Download Learning for a small planet

Learning for a small planet
aa rreesseeaarrcch
h aag
geen
nd
daa
Etienne Wenger
March 2004
Learning for a small planet is a unique research project to develop a social learning
theory for the 21st century. It is ambitious, long-term, and unconventional; but it is a
compelling aspiration. Many of the challenges we face today can be understood as
learning challenges: economic development, the creation of a world culture that is
both global and diverse, international security, the environment, health—to name a
few. All these challenges require accelerated learning at multiple levels of scales at
once, from individuals, to communities, to regions, to the whole world. But such
deep and multi-scale learning is not simply a cognitive challenge; it entails a
transformation of our very identities. Most of our current thinking about learning is
not up to the task. Building on the work on communities of practice, this project will
develop a theory of multi-scale learning systems. This is an urgent task because
our understanding of learning guides how we perceive what is happening and
decide what to do about it.
To place this theory building in context, the project aims to paint a broad portrait of
learning on the planet today. How to think about learning in a globalizing world?
What are trends we can observe? What do these trends suggest for practitioners in
business, education, government, and the non-profit sector? Where are projects
and innovations that point the way?
The research also seeks to be innovative in the way it is conducted. It aims to be a
“public” research project—a kind of open-source Manhattan project on learning.
Using emerging web technologies, it will involve a broad network of researchers,
practitioners, and everyday learners in telling stories and exploring ideas about
learning. How to involve large segments of the public in such a research project?
How to bridge a wide variety of areas and perspectives? How to integrate these
contributions into a compelling analysis? How to combine academic rigor with
popular appeal? Eventually, the hope is to sustain a broad conversation on our
individual and collective learning needs, capabilities, and aspirations: the learning
of our small planet.
In my search for an academic position, I have been asked to articulate my vision for a
research agenda. This document is the fruit of this thinking. Part manifesto, part project
proposal, part speculation—and very much a “work in progress”—it builds on the earlier
work on communities of practice to convey a general sense of the long-term research
agenda I would like to pursue in the years ahead.
LLeeaarrnniinngg ffoorr aa ssm
maallll ppllaanneett
aa rreesseeaarrcchh aaggeennddaa
Executive summary
We live in unusual times. The world is rapidly growing smaller, interdependent, and
unpredictable. We are facing daunting challenges—the establishment of a global yet
diverse society, a fragile environment, economic imbalances, and regional conflicts to
name a few. These challenges are neither simply local nor abstractly global. They
require accelerated learning at various levels of scale at once, from individuals, to
communities, to organizations, to regions, to worldwide learning systems. Understanding
how to enhance our learning capabilities in this multi-dimensional nexus is taking
increasing urgency. This proposal outlines a broad research agenda to produce a social
learning theory for our times.
A theoretical discourse is not an abstraction. It is a set of conceptual tools that enable us
to see, think, and act in new ways. The learning theory to be developed in this project is
intended to inform not only research, but also the work of practitioners in a variety of
fields and sectors, for instance:
• Executives in the private and public sectors who need to figure out how to
enhance the learning capability of organizations
• Educators who reflect on the role of education in a learning society, on the
learning needs of their students, and on the relationships of their institutions to
broader social learning systems
• Government officials who struggle to rethink their role as conveners of learning
systems that include multiple government levels, private industry, and citizen
groups (e.g., terrorism preparedness, health, education)
• Policy-makers and non-governmental activists who need to understand the
learning implications of their positions
• Community leaders and social workers who need to consider the identities as
learners that enable citizens to participate in society
To this end, the proposed agenda places theory building in the context of a broader
research framework. The project consists of five components:
1. Theory. This project furthers the convergence of learning theory and social theory
started with the work on communities of practice. Building on this earlier work, it
focuses on
• large-scale social learning systems involving complex constellations of
communities of practice
• individual identity, constructed as a learning trajectory through these complex
systems
I argue that these two elements provide the foundation for a robust social theory of
learning. Each one is, I claim, a useful perspective for looking at learning in today’s
complex and globalizing society. But the two are inextricably linked and considering
learning in one inevitably leads the other. Together, they provide a framework for
theorizing learning capability.
Research agenda v1.1
i
2. Trends. Building on the theory, the project will hypothesize and document a number
of trends in learning. This proposal describes four examples of such trends, for
instance, an observation that learning seems increasingly organized as a horizontal
process of mutual negotiation, as opposed to the more traditional view of a vertical
relationship between a producer and a recipient of knowledge. The ultimate goal is to
combine a set of broad trends like this one into an emerging and dynamic portrait of
learning in the world today.
3. Implications. Combining the trends and the theory should produce interesting
practical implications, which the project will explore. In particular, the combination
can be used to frame a rethinking of social institutions from the perspective of their
contribution to our overall learning capability. This proposal takes an initial look at
such institutions as
• organizations in the private and public sectors, where knowledge strategies entail
an integration of identity-based communities with hierarchical structures
• civil society, where learning calls for increasingly complex community structures
• governance, where the role of convening a learning system broadens the
traditional notions of government and management
• education, where the theory helps reposition schooling and frame the principles
of an identity-oriented curriculum
4. Cases. The empirical base of the project will be a systematic collection of stories and
case studies to make the theory, the trends, and the implications concrete. Cases
might include organizational initiatives, school experiments, interesting communities,
large-scale learning systems, as well as biographical narratives of individual learning
trajectories. Through ongoing analysis of this growing corpus of cases, the project
will look for patterns to confirm or reject hypotheses. These concrete examples also
help practitioners see how they can put the framework into practice.
5. Methodology. The fifth element of the project is an ongoing process of
methodological reflection necessary to ensure that there is a systematic rigor to the
development of the framework and its application.
The full proposal describes these five components in greater detail. All five components
work together. The theory suggests trends and design implications. These in turn
suggest cases to study, which feed back into the theory, the trends, and the implications.
The methodological component adds a reflexive learning loop to the process. This
reflection also focuses on walking the talk and building a learning system around the
project. Not only are practitioners expected to benefit from the results of the research,
they are welcome to contribute their own stories, requirements, and insights.
This project is long-term, cross-sectoral, and interdisciplinary. Its scope is meant to
spawn a multitude of related projects that invite the involvement of students, from short
case studies to full dissertations. In addition, the project aspires to become the kernel of
a broad community of practitioners and researchers who I know are ready to become
engaged in an agenda to further develop an intellectual foundation for their work.
* * * * * * *
I am now looking for an academic home for this research, as well as sources of funding
for supporting student projects, workshops, conferences, the systematic management of
the corpus of cases and stories, and writing for a variety of audiences. If your institution
or foundation is interested, I am ready to talk.
Research agenda v1.1
ii
LLeeaarrnniinngg ffoorr aa ssm
maallll ppllaanneett
aa rreesseeaarrcchh aaggeennddaa
Table of contents
Introduction
1
Overall approach: five components
A boundary-crossing research enterprise
1. Social learning theory: the production of meaningfulness
4
Agency and structure in social learning systems
Large-scale social learning systems
Identity
Identity and learning systems: a dual perspective on learning
Structural dimension of learning capability
Functional elements of learning capability
A social theory of learning
2. Learning trends: an emerging portrait
19
The “horizontalization” of learning
The “partialization” of learning imperatives
The “personalization” of value creation
The “individualization” of trajectories of identity
Trends and patterns: an emerging gestalt
3. Learning implications: action, design, and institutions
25
Organizations: institutionalizing learning imperatives
Civil society: the social fabric of learning
Governance: emergence and stewardship
Education: the management of trajectories of identity
Theory in practice
4. Learning stories: a corpus of cases
35
Purpose of the corpus
Elements of the corpus
A nexus of research projects
5. Learning in the future: reflection on methodology
A learning theory for a small planet
37
38
Bibliography
Research agenda v1.1
iii
LLeeaarrnniinngg ffoorr aa ssm
maallll ppllaanneett
aa rreesseeaarrcchh aaggeennddaa
Introduction
The purpose of this research project is to develop a theoretical foundation to help
address the learning challenges of our globalizing world. The production of a theoretical
discourse is a consequential activity to the extent that it enables new ways of seeing,
thinking, talking, and therefore acting. My sense is that the concept of community of
practice has turned out to be surprisingly influential precisely because it produces such a
discourse: it enables people to give voice to something they already knew, but did not
quite have the language to act upon. The discourse is important, but it is only a small
part. It serves the enterprise of a community, which uses it for acting in the world and
thus gives it its actualized meaning. It is the aspiration of the proposed research project
to help build an intellectual foundation for, but also with, a community of people
concerned with learning on our small planet.
The scope of the project is broad. It looks at learning as a social process that does not
know national, sectoral, or disciplinary boundaries. The idea is that a learning theory for
our times must be able to talk about the world itself as a global learning system in which
our individual learning takes place. It cannot be confined by the traditional divisions
among education, business, government, non-profit, and civic domains. Nor can it
assume that learning is confined to specific settings or moments in people’s lives.
Learning is a property of social systems at various levels of scale. It is also the driving
force of lifelong trajectories that we build in the context of these social systems.
The horizon of the project is long-term. I plan to work on it for the rest of my career. It is
also long-term in its outlook: it considers the evolution of learning in society over a time
frame of a few decades. It does not take current systems as given, and short-term
improvements to these systems are not the driver of the work. The project seeks to
create a vision of learning, of what is required, of what is possible. Such a long-term
view does not exclude immediate relevance. I believe we need to act. But the project
places imperatives for action in the context of a long-range view of what a learning
society needs. It uses this long-range view to inform opportunities for action or to
reinterpret current developments and projects as to their long-term significance.
Developing a discourse on learning for a shrinking planet is thus both unreasonably
ambitious and reasonably humble. It has to be ambitious in its scope and horizon to do
justice to its topic. But it has to be humble in claiming only to provide the underlying
discourse—the thinking tools, not finished solutions or plans of action. A discourse, no
matter how interesting, is lame without a living community.
At a time when the world seems as small as our challenges seem complex, our
understanding of learning needs to match the tasks at hand—whether we consider the
environment, poverty, health, crime, terrorism, education, the politics of globalization …
or our very own place in all this. We need models to learn how to learn at multiple levels
of scale, from the personal to the planetary. Increasing our capacity to learn—
individually and collectively—is taking on a special urgency if we see ourselves caught,
as I believe we are, in a race between learning and self-destruction.
Research agenda v1.1
1
Learning trends
understand emerging
trends for learning in
the world today
Learning implications
explore implications for
action, design, and
institutions
Learning stories
build a diverse,
cross-sectoral corpus
of early examples
Ongoing methodological reflection
Learning theory
develop a social
theory of learning as a
conceptual framework
Figure 1. Overall approach
Overall approach: five components
To help make sense of and address the learning challenges we face today, the current
project will further the convergence of learning theory and social theory started with the
work on communities of practice. A disciplined social theory of learning has to meet a
number of criteria. It must:
• honor what is fundamental about human beings and their societies
• elucidate what is specifically contemporary and point to what is emergent
• enable new possibilities for action and research
• be accountable to the world in two ways:
• provide an account of data acceptable to its own disciplinary communities
• be useful more broadly to the very learners the theory speaks about
In light of these requirements, the project as I currently see it needs to include the five
components shown in Figure 1:
•
Social learning theory. What extensions to the current theory are useful?
Develop a theoretical discourse on learning that focuses on both identity and largescale social learning systems. Doing so by building on the work on communities of
practice will expand the theory while preserving the focus on the negotiation of
meaning that is a hallmark of its perspective on learning.
•
Learning trends. Where is learning going in the world today?
Look at broad trends and patterns in learning that can be better understood in light of
the theory. These trends place new requirements on the theory and paint a picture of
the world in which to position efforts to promote learning.
Research agenda v1.1
2
•
Learning implications. What does this suggest for supporting learning?
From this combination of theory and trends, develop design patterns for action and
explore the role of social institutions such as schooling, business, and government.
•
Learning stories. Where can we see advance signs of these directions?
Develop a corpus of case studies, stories, biographies, articles and other data that
represent emergent illustrations of the theory, the trends, and the implications.
Analyze this diverse corpus of examples of learning systems to uncover patterns and
principles.
•
A research methodology. How to make the research rigorous, consistent and useful?
Reflect on the development of a framework combining theory, trends, and practical
implications, and the use of stories to validate this framework. Reflecting on the
research enterprise and its methodology is important for two reasons. First, its
orientation to the future through theoretically-driven trends and implications poses
some methodological challenges about the choice and treatment of data. Second, it
is itself a learning journey; and one of its challenges is therefore to try to be
consistent with its own principles.
All five elements are facets of the same research enterprise. They have to be developed
in parallel and in interrelation. The theory illuminates trends and suggests design
implications. These in turn suggest examples that are interesting to investigate. The
resulting corpus of examples anchors the whole project in observable cases, which in
turn suggest additional trends, implications, and conceptual refinements.
A boundary-crossing research enterprise
This project will need to combine theory and practice in ways that are not restricted by
sectoral or disciplinary boundaries. The concept of community of practice and the
attendant theory of learning has influenced thinking in many academic fields as well as
numerous areas of application in organizational design, education, government, and
information technology. Whichever school or department I end up being primarily
attached to, this new project will inevitably blur disciplinary boundaries. It will also need
to be systematically cross-sectoral for two complementary reasons:
•
Sectors share similar learning issues.
Business, government, non-profit, educational, and civic organizations share many of
the same learning challenges. They have a lot to learn from each other. Finding
patterns and principles that cross sectors is therefore a fruitful endeavor, which is
likely to yield new insights and innovative ideas.
•
Problems requiring learning cut across sectors.
Most significant learning challenges today cannot be addressed within the confine of
a given sector. Take the example of the environment: our ability to learn in this area
depends on coordinated actions from business, government, research, philanthropy,
education, etc. Similarly, the learning trajectory of a person integrates learning in
private life, at work, in civic engagement, in politics, in instructional contexts, etc.
The rest of this paper uses illustrations from business, education, and civic sectors. It
describes each of the five components of the research agenda in Figure 1 to clarify what
they contribute to the project and foreshadow the directions in which I intend to take
them.
Research agenda v1.1
3
1. Social learning theory: the production of meaningfulness
To a large extent, learning theory has focused on the mechanics of learning—brain
research, genetics, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, information-processing
models. The theory I am proposing to develop focuses on meaningfulness. It is not a
replacement for theories of the mechanics of learning. It addresses a different level, just
as the interpretation of a painting in terms of its meaning addresses a different level than
a study of its canvass, techniques, brush stokes, and pigments, even though these
factors of course play an important role in the interpretation of the painting. The study of
the mechanics of learning is very relevant and useful, both theoretically and practically.
But I will argue that focusing on meaningfulness is also critical because it is the level at
which learning becomes part of the experience of being human. Without a focus on
meaningfulness, we are likely to miss what is most important about human learning—
whether we are building theories or trying to foster learning in practice.
The community of practice theory was beginning to focus on meaningfulness by placing
learning within a social context in which the meaning of learning could be negotiated. It
is a social theory of learning in that it develops from the premise that we are
fundamentally social beings and that this obvious observation, far from trivial, is key to
understanding learning when the focus is on meaningfulness:
•
The negotiation of new meanings—not just the acquisition of new skills or
information—is fundamental to human learning.
•
It is in the social nature of our being that we root our ability to negotiate meaning.
•
The negotiation of meaning is embedded in the practice of specific human
communities. These communities and their practices provide material for our
learning—language, artifacts, interpretation of the world, whether we are interacting
with others or by ourselves.1
•
So understood, learning transforms our engagement the world as well as our being
in the world. Learning is a therefore a social becoming, the ongoing negotiation of an
identity that we develop in the context of participation (and non-participation) in
communities and their practices.
The project proposed here builds on this foundation. But it attempts to develop a
learning theory for a globalizing world, for a small planet. To this end, it pushes the
theory in two opposite directions at once:
•
In one direction, it focuses on large-scale learning systems that include a whole
constellation of interrelated communities, in interaction with other structuring
elements (institutions, markets, culture, governance, etc.).
•
In the other direction, it focuses on the formation of identity as a trajectory through
multiple communities, with a focus on the processes by which the person is
constructed across contexts.
1
It is important here to distinguish a social theory of learning from a theory of social learning. A social theory
of learning claims that human learning is fundamentally social in the sense defined here, whether it takes
place in social interactions, in a group, or by oneself. This theory therefore does not suggest that we learn
better in groups or in other interactional contexts or that individual learning is somehow inferior or to be
avoided. I want to offer this clarification because such superficial interpretations have turned out to be quite
common. Nor does a social theory of learning deny our genetic heritage; it simply claims that our experience
of our genetic given is under culturally based interpretation.
Research agenda v1.1
4
Figure 2. Trajectories: identity and learning systems
This simultaneous emphasis on large learning systems and on individual identity is
illustrated in Figure 2. Today, the contexts for negotiating meaning and identity are
broadening and complexifying.2 We are exposed in various ways to a great variety of
practices and communities. In such a world, the role of individual identity is increased as
the locus of the negotiation of meaning. This is consistent with the focus on communities
of practice. Indeed, the “community of practice” theory predicts that as societies become
more complex in terms of forms of participation, the negotiation of identity becomes a
more individual enterprise. In a simple situation where there is one community, the
development of individual identities and the development of the community are more or
less parallel. There is companionship is negotiating an identity. In complex situations
where everyone belongs to very large numbers of different communities over the course
of their lives and at any given time, the parallelism disappears because each person is a
unique intersection of multimembership.3 The project of identity is at once more
fragmented and more individual. Theorizing learning in these terms requires a dual focus
on identity and complex social learning systems; this is the core theme of the project.
The rest of this section revisits some of the foundational ideas of a social theory of
learning to give the reader sense of the conceptual framework I would like to develop.
2
Saying that the community structure of the world is complexifying is not an argument that modern life is
inherently more complex than human life was earlier in any general linear sense; it is merely saying that we
are made aware of a wider range of possible forms of participation—some of which we engage in and some
of which remain foreign.
3
From a theoretical standpoint, this reasoning does not take the individual as the foundation of agency, but
regains a notion of individual agent from the theory itself. In other words, the individual as we conceive of it
today is not the point of departure of a theory of identity, but the product of the increasing complexity of the
community structure of society (See Wenger, 1998, ch. 6 for more details).
Research agenda v1.1
5
Agency and structure in social learning systems
On way to interpret the early work on communities of practice is as an initial attempt to
bring together social theory and learning theory. In this regard, the theoretical thrust of
the current research project is to further this mutual elaboration. One of the central
questions in social theory is the relation between social structure and agency. Some
theories give primacy to one or the other. Some assert that social structure—societies,
cultures, history—are primary and individual actions are merely a reflection of
membership in these structures. Others assert that social structures are but the
emergent property of an aggregate of individual actions. More recent developments in
social theory have emphasized the ongoing, mutual constitution of the two.4
From this perspective, communities of practice are a context in which structure and
agency meet through learning. The community and its practice represent a social
structure; membership and engagement in practice represent agency. The community of
practice is a linchpin concept for both learning and social theory because it refers to an
intermediary level of analysis in which learning brings structure and agency in close
interaction: the community is “within reach” of the members, so to speak.
This is in contrast to other levels of analysis that are largely beyond the reach of
individual participants: on the one hand, broad issues of history, culture, and social
structures writ large (on which social actors have little direct effects), and on the other
hand, underlying issues of individual psychology and biology (also largely beyond the
reach of everyday awareness). In this regard, the focus on communities, practice,
meaning, and identity represents a specific slice on the question of human learning. This
mid-level focus is represented by the peach-color band in Figure 3.
The current project maintains the theme of the structure/agency interplay but expands
the scope as shown in Figure 3. In each case, the focus is on multiple communities, as
illustrated earlier in Figure 2, but in ways that mirror each other. Large-scale learning
systems include many communities of practice, and our identities reflect the fluidity of
our membership in multiple communities, at the same time and over the course of our
lives. This simultaneous focus on constellations of communities of practice and
individual trajectories will place emphasis on aspects of the theory that have not
received as much attention as communities of practice per se: boundary structures,
multimembership, cross-community trajectories, various modes of belonging, and largescale properties of composite systems.
Broadening the theoretical scope is not to abandon the focus on communities of
practice. Because of its mid-level character, the concept of community of practice is a
useful entry point into the study of learning systems and identity formation. It is a way to
account for both the learning complexity of large social systems and the partiality of our
participation in them. Indeed, our participation in specific communities acts as a
mediating context of engagement for negotiating the meaning of large structures and our
experience of identity in them. We may work for a large organization, but interact with a
4
A good example is “structuration theory,” as developed by Anthony Giddens (1984), which asserts that
social structures and social agency always constitute each other through human actions, though as much
through unintended consequences of action as through intended effects. Many of the concepts developed
here are instances of structuration processes, starting with learning in communities of practice.
Research agenda v1.1
6
Theories of
social structure
Learning
systems
Theories of
practice
A social
theory of learning
Theories of
community/identity
Individual
trajectories
Theories of
experience
Figure 3. Evolving conceptual framework
much smaller community of colleagues with whom we discuss what it means to belong
to the larger organization.5
The next sections build on the duality of learning systems and identity. First, I describe
the structure of large-scale social learning in terms of five dimensions relevant to the
structuring of learning. Then I define identity using mirror images of the same five
dimensions. 6 Finally, I make a case for taking the duality of identity and learning
systems as the foundation for a learning theory. I argue that when it comes to the
production of meaningfulness, learning is subsumed under identity and that social
learning systems provide the context for this process.
Large-scale social learning systems
Considering the community structure of large-scale learning systems brings to bear a
number of dimensions that have been traditional concerns in social theory:
• Scale: the “fractal” nature of learning systems with communities forming nested
levels of aggregation
• Space: the multiplicity of heterogeneous practices that constitute a learning system
and the boundaries between corresponding communities
• Time: rhythms and generations as communities evolve through interactions among
their members and with other communities
• Culture: the systems of signification by which we negotiate meaning and create local
interpretations in various practices
• Power: the issues of legitimacy by which learning becomes knowledge, internally in
communities, and in broader social systems
5
Using the biological metaphor of the study of life, one could compare the level of a community of practice
to that of a “cell.” It is not the smallest possible unit, but it is the smallest one that has all the characteristics
of life. Similarly, the community of practice is the most basic social structure that has all the characteristics of
the structure/agency interaction through a history of learning.
6
See Wenger (1998), especially Part II, and Wenger (2000) for more detailed, but earlier, formulations of
these ideas.
Research agenda v1.1
7
It is worth reviewing these dimensions briefly to provide a clearer sense of the theory.
The reader in a hurry can skip to page 10.
Scale: the fractalness of community structure
Communities are defined at multiple levels of scale, from local groups to large umbrella
communities. You can be a member of a local community of practice of Java
programmers at your company, all the way to the worldwide Java community, with all
kinds of levels in between. When talking about social learning systems, the issue of
scale is not to move from the small to the big, but to explore how the small and the big
coexist and constitute each other. Communities are nested within another in a “fractal”
structure. By fractal, I mean that each level of aggregation is constituted by similar
structures at a lower level, but that new levels of aggregation have emergent properties
not found at lower levels. Some properties are gained, such as the ability to “sanction
knowledge,” which often exists at the level of a discipline rather than local communities.
Some properties are lost, such as regular face-to-face interaction. But the community
structure exists at all levels—with identity being the scale-free property that remains
intrinsic across levels. In this context, I would define community formally as the “fractal
projection of identity.”
Space: diversity and boundaries
At each level of scale, the social space of a learning system is defined by the multiplicity
of practices and communities that interact to constitute such a system. Along this
dimension, it is important to focus on the boundary structure of the system, the specific
kind of learning that can take place there, and the processes by which it takes place.
Indeed, these boundaries are both areas of possible troubles—ignorance,
misunderstanding, mistrust—and areas of high learning potential—novel combinations,
radical innovation, creative solutions.
Note that this space dimension is related, but distinct from, and orthogonal to the scale
dimension. Focusing on the community structure of large-scale learning systems along
these two dimensions provides a way to study their internal structure as well as their
connections with other learning systems. Along the space dimension, it makes it
possible to understand the system in terms of specific domains of knowledge. For
instance, the community of neurosurgeons in a hospital needs to interact with the
community of anesthesiologists, nurses or hospital administrators locally and develop
the necessary boundary processes to enable mutual learning. At the same time, along
the scale dimension, the communities of practice to which people belong locally are
connected to other similar communities of practice elsewhere. The local neurosurgeons’
community is also connected to a broader community of neurosurgeons, with colleagues
in other hospitals, universities, cities, and countries. The local community will need to
develop these connections to learn from these other locations.
Time: learning histories
The histories of learning systems develop in the interaction among these levels:
communities form new generations, adopt new technologies, make new discoveries.
Communities of practice have their own lifecycles and generational waves. In addition,
they themselves arise and disappear, giving broader systems their rhythm of flux and
crystallization, innovation and rigidities, stability and transformation. Learning systems
are always dynamic even when they appear stable. They persist over time by
Research agenda v1.1
8
reproducing themselves across generations and changing circumstances. Time is
therefore never simple continuity. And change always involves a historical legacy. Death
and birth, development and aging—of people, of communities, of ideas, of
technologies—are a fundamental part of this process. Of course, in the case of a social
learning system, how much pain death and birth create for participants may or may not
be socially and personally acceptable. Renewal and transformations involve human
identities that are invested in the histories of specific communities.
Culture: participation, reification, and negotiation
Social systems provide resources for the negotiation of meaning in two ways. On the
one hand there is the structure of participation in the practice of various communities. On
the other hand, there is the structure of reification, that is, the process of producing
objects (physical or conceptual artifacts) through which communities give their practice
an embodiment in the world. At each moment of engagement in the world, we bring
these two structures together to negotiate the meaning of our experience.
This dual character of human practice as a context for meaningfulness was brought to
life for me one evening as I was having dinner with a friend. He served me a glass of
wine and asked me what I thought of it. I said that it was good, but I must have offended
him because I did not know that he was a wine taster in his spare time. He started to
describe what this glass of wine was for him, and there were hazelnuts, strawberries,
oak, and colors in different place in the mouth and the nose. I realized that his
experience of wine belonged to a world to which I had no access. I could hear the words;
I had access to the reification, in this case, familiar words. But it would have taken me
hours of participation in tasting and discussing tastes to be able to really understand this
practice. In such combination of participation and reification, human communities create
worlds of meanings, which simply do not exist for outsiders.
The story illustrates two fundamental principles about culture defined as intertwined
structures of participation and reification. First, culture so defined is fractal in nature. The
words my friend used were borrowed from common language and mutually understood
at a different level of scale, but with very specific meanings in the context of wine tasting.
Second, the structures of participation and reification are not congruent or locked in each
other because people and artifacts travel differently through social systems. I had
access to the words, but not to the participation that would have allowed me to
understand his meaning. The words could even have been printed on a label or on the
web. Conversely, had he said nothing but just blissfully drunk his glass with all the
ritualistic moves, I would have missed access to the reification structures he was using
to make sense of his experience.
More generally, a word or a tool may be adopted in a different community, but there is
no guarantee that its meaning will be preserved or continuous in the translation. This
open interpretive potential creates a diversity of signification across a system, which is
essential to the dynamism of the system required for learning. At the same time, systemlevel learning requires some degree of continuity of meaning across boundaries so that
people can learn from each other. A social learning theory needs to encompass this
tension between diversity and mutual intelligibility and theorize how it affects learning
capability.
Research agenda v1.1
9
Power: economies of meaning
Learning involves the ability to create new meanings. But this ability entails relations of
power: to what extent do our interpretations of the world have legitimacy to ourselves
and to others? In other words, to what extent does our learning become “knowledge”
that can enable us to participate in the world? Therefore a social theory of learning must
include a theory of power to account for the legitimacy and social efficacy of our
experience of learning.7
Learning always takes place in the context of economies of meaning, where power is
defined as the legitimacy of the meanings we arrive at. Note that power in this context is
not defined as evil or dominating; it is an intrinsic dimension of a social learning system
in which learning creates an experience that may or may not gain legitimacy.
Communities of practice are important structural elements of economies of meaning
because they define areas of competence that locally confer (or refuse) legitimacy to
what we learn. Actually, in my earlier work, I have defined learning as a tension
between the socially defined competence of communities and our own experience,
whichever is leading the other.8 In apprenticeship, for instance, it is the competence of
the community that molds the experience of the newcomer. Had I wanted to become a
wine taster, I would have used the competence of the community to mold my
experience, drinking and discussing wine with others, reading critiques and books, until
my experience of wines reflected the community’s competence. In innovation, it is the
experience of some members that molds the competence of the community. If my friend
had discovered a brand new flavor while tasting some exotic wine, he would have had to
convince the rest of the wine tasters that this flavor indeed existed so that his experience
be included in the competence of the community. Both cases involve struggles for
legitimacy that are fundamental to learning.
But economies of meaning do not operate inside communities of practice only. They
reflect the fractal nature of learning systems. A competence that has great legitimacy
inside a community may not have much legitimacy outside that community depending on
the position of the community in the broader economies of meaning in which it operates.
Great success among your fellow gang members may not confer much legitimacy to
your perspective in other contexts. And in fact, it may be counter-productive or even
disempowering in other contexts.
Identity
For the purpose of this theory, I formally define identity as “a learned experience of
agency” in the context of social structures. Mirror images of the five dimensions of
learning systems listed above contribute to this definition of identity, making the
definition complex and multi-dimensional:
7
The question of the place of theories of power in learning is crucial. For theorists like Michel Foucault, the
issue of power is so central that it almost leads to an equivalence of knowledge and power (Foucault, 1980).
On the one hand, the situatedness of learning has to be understood in the context of institutionalized forms
of power, such as organizations and states, as argued by Contu and Willmott (2003). On the other hand, it is
important to place the reproduction of institutional structure in the context of their interpretation in practice
and the learning taking place there, as advocated by Paul Willis (1977).
8
For the full definition, see Wenger, 1998, Coda I. This is then extended in ch. 11 to address the learning
potential of systems of communities.
Research agenda v1.1
10
•
•
•
•
•
Scale: identity, like systems, is fractal in that it is defined at multiple levels of
aggregation, from the local context in which we engage to broad structures and
communities with which we identify
Space: multimembership is a fundamental characteristic of identity as we belong to a
multiplicity of communities and yet learn to be one person
Time: identity is produced in time as a trajectory, both within and across communities
Culture: practices at each level of community include a discourse of the self that
provides material for negotiating an identity
Power: our identity is shaped by and shapes the legitimacy of our own experience
with respect to the economies of meaning in which our learning takes place
Let us briefly review these dimensions as they apply to identity. The reader in a hurry
can skip to page 13.
Scale: the fractalness of identity
I have argued that identity is the scale-free foundation that cuts across levels of
aggregation in social systems. We can identify with our family, our neighborhood, our
city, our nation, our species—all within one identity. Similarly, our identity as an engineer
encompasses at once all the engineers in the world, our local team, our regional society,
our engineering specialties and subspecialties (mechanical, automotive, brakes), our
university degree, and the few things we consider ourselves especially good at. These
levels may have different degrees of intensity or resonance. They may even conflict.
Still, our identities can cover the entire fractal structure of learning systems with their
multiple levels of nested communities. Our identities are both local and global in scope.
In this regard, learning involves a local/global interplay in that it transforms the entire
range of our identities through the whole fractal. 9
Because the scope of our engagement and scope of our identification are not congruent,
it is useful to think about the relations between learning systems and identity formation in
terms of distinct modes of belonging, which operate at various levels of scale within the
community structure of large learning systems. Those identified so far in my work
include engagement, imagination, and alignment.10 This project may uncover others.
Various combinations of these modes result in different types of communities.
Space: multimembership
Our identities also reflect the heterogeneity of learning systems as we develop relations
of participation and non-participation in multiple communities of practice. (We define
ourselves by the communities we belong to, but also through communities we do not
belong to—whether by choice or by exclusion). Multimembership is thus a fundamental
characteristic of identity. Essential to the construction of identity is the ongoing work of
reconciling (with various degrees of success) membership in multiple communities and
our involvement in multiple relationships into the experience of being one person.
9
The ability of individual identity to be coextensive with the whole system is a key difference between social
systems and complex adaptive systems in the natural world. We participate in social systems with an image
of the system that we construct through and embody in our identities.
10
For full definitions, see Wenger, 1998, ch. 8.
Research agenda v1.1
11
Time: trajectories
Individual identities form through participation in these systems, which is experienced as
a trajectory in and out of communities over time. Trajectory as the term is used here
does not connote a simple linear path, especially in the context of multimembership. A
trajectory can be very convoluted, with returns and loops. With respect to a community,
trajectories are sometimes inbound, sometimes outbound, and sometimes simply
peripheral. But through all these phases and changing contexts, the use of the term is
meant to suggest a continuity of the person produced as an experience of identity over
time—through memories, through narratives, and through social expectations that you
are still the same person. Trajectories of identity place any moment of participation in the
context of a personal history, which includes where we come from and where we think
we are going.
Culture: discourses of the self
Each community produces a discourse of the self, which is embodied in its structures of
participation and reification. This discourse of the self is both internal and external. It
includes how members make distinctions among themselves and how the community
defines itself in the world. Discourses of the self at multiple levels of scale are not limited
to the “big” categories of identity that have traditionally been the focus of social theory
(class, gender, race, nationality, ethnicity). They include the myriad ways—some
inconsequential, some salient—in which the social structures we inhabit define ways of
being in the world that become constitutive of our identity (nerd, sociable, good at
facilitation, lurker, from the south side of town, with a sense of rhythm, etc., etc.). These
discourses do not necessarily involve much reflexivity. More importantly, they do not
determine identity. They provide material, embraced or resisted, for the ongoing
negotiation of the experience of identity.
Power: identification and agency
Defined as a learned experience of agency, the concept of identity requires a theory of
power to talk about the ability to act as an agent. Learning changes our ability to be an
agent in the world and therefore involves relations of power—including competence and
incompetence, participation and non-participation, centrality and marginalization. These
struggles for legitimacy depend on relationships of identification, which make us
accountable to the competence of certain communities. In other words, being recognized
as competent only matters to the extent that one identifies with the communities that can
confer legitimacy to learning. If you think that academics are full of it, who cares if they
don’t find you competent. Short of the threat of violence, the power they have over you
depends on your degree of identification with their communities and values.11 The very
notion of community as the object of identification implies a power structure in an
economy of meaning (again without assuming that power is necessarily evil, but a
feature of agency). A theory of learning that focuses on identity needs to account for
these relations of power, which are inherent in human existence.12
11
Even the threat of violence depends to some extent on identification. For instance, once identification with
the fear of death is removed, exercise of power becomes very problematic. This is one reason groups that
have overcome the fear of death, such as early Christians or some terrorists today, are such a puzzle for
state powers.
12
Conversely, I would claim that a theory of power needs to be anchored in a theory of identity to explain
how power achieves efficacy (through identification) and thus why people embrace or contest structures of
power (see Wenger, 1998, ch. 9). Without a theory of identity, it seems as though power has its own
efficacy.
Research agenda v1.1
12
Identities and learning systems: a dual perspective on learning
Equipped with a multi-dimensional view of learning systems and identities, it is now
possible to explicate better how this dual perspective is a useful way to talk about
learning. Indeed, I have talked a lot about identity, some about competence, but little
about knowledge, skills, and information. This may come as a surprise for a theory of
learning. But I think it is a very significant move. Identity as I have defined it does include
knowledge and skills, but subsumed under a “learned experience of agency,” which is
not solely, or even primarily cognitive. In addition to cognition it encompasses all the
constituents of this experience, including our body with a specific genetic makeup,
emotions, relationships, social existence, and our engagement in the world—all under
interpretation as they become part of who we are. If we do not subsume skills and
knowledge under identity, we are incapable of theorizing how learning can change our
actual ability to participate in the world. That a skill is learnable in its mechanics does not
entail that it is useable or meaningful in the context of an identity engaged in the world. It
is knowledge as identity that one can make use of because it is part of who we are as an
agent. That is why I choose to subsume issues of knowledge and skills under identity
and focus the learning theory on providing a complex perspective on identity.
At the other end of the spectrum, I have talked about social learning systems at various
levels of scale. This is because I believe that we cannot focus on learning in terms of
identity without including the social systems with which identity is, so to speak,
coextensive. Even if we are focused on a specific task, we do it with our entire person.
Identity is not something we turn on and off. We do not cease to be parents when we go
to work even if we mostly manifest other aspects of identities while there. Our identity as
parent is right below the surface. Talk about a problem with children at work, and all the
parents are listening all of a sudden. When we negotiate the meaning of a situation, we
do it with the full range of resources within the scope of our identity, which I have
argued, reflects the fractal nature of the social systems in which we live. A kid in a
classroom, a worker in an office, a person watching the news on TV—all interpret what
they are doing, seeing, hearing with the full extent of their identity, in scale, in space, in
time, in culture, and in power. Once we move from a focus on cognition to a focus on
identity, we have to include within the theory the full range of resources available to
learners for negotiating meaning and producing an experience of agency.
But the reverse is also true. To theorize the learning of a social system, we have to take
into account the identities that live in it. Identities and social structures reflect each other,
as the dimensions suggest, but they are not locked in a mirror image. Identity is not
something fixed. The ongoing work of identity always has the potential of reframing
social structures. In our identities, we can stretch through the social fractal and bring the
perspective of one level in another: we can “act locally and think globally,” as the bumper
sticker says. Our multimembership reflects the boundaries of our social systems, but we
also bridge and redraw these boundaries because we are one person across them. We
belong to specific generations, but we can take in the stories of our elders and share our
own stories with those who follow us. As we walk through life with our identities in the
making, we are constantly—in our own, partial, and largely unknowing ways—weaving
and reweaving the social fabric of our societies. Our identities are the learning capability
of the world.
Research agenda v1.1
13
Structural dimensions of learning capability
One aspiration of this framework is to theorize the learning capability of social systems
and social actors as they shape each other. Earlier, I mentioned the definition of learning
as a tension between socially-defined competence and personal experience, whichever
is pulling the other. To come back to the wine example, in the tension between my
experience of a glass of wine and the competence of wine tasters lies a learning
potential. Similarly, in the tension between someone’s experience of a new taste and the
pondering of other wine tasters whether this new taste deserves to become part of the
shared competence lies a learning potential. Realizing this potential depends on our
ability to set up and embrace the tension between competence and experience. If
experience and competence are locked in, if the experience of members always simply
mirrors the existing competence of their community, not much learning takes place. The
practice is stale. Conversely, if the two are too distant, not much learning takes place
either: mostly what I learned with my glass of wine was that I was not a member of that
community. Bringing experience and competence in tension would have taken much
more interaction—and the corresponding mutual opening of our respective identities.
Placed in the dimensions introduced earlier, this definition of learning provides the
ingredients for a theory of learning capability and potential innovativeness of complex
learning systems. Competence and experience are in different relations at the core and
at the boundaries of practices, at the encounters between generations, and in relations
of power among participants. The innovative potential of a system lies in its combination
of strong practices and active boundary processes—people who can engage across
boundaries, but have enough depth in their own practice that they can recognize when
something is really significantly new. You have to combine this with enough mobility to
enable members to redirect their trajectories as emerging opportunities arise. There is a
whole theory of learning capability there. All these ingredients of innovation operate in
the context of the systems/identity dimensions. How are these processes affected by
scale and by “practice distance”? Who can act as broker across boundaries? What are
the issues and opportunities presented by generations of people and ideas? How does
culture foster or inhibit encounters that reposition the competence/experience relation?
What are the implications of forms and concentration of power on the learning capability
of a social system?
There are corresponding questions about identity and learning capability. Just as a
community becomes stale when the experience of its members merely reproduces its
existing competence, so does an identity become stale when its experience becomes
merely self-reproducing. We talk about the aging of the body, but we need to talk about
the aging of identities, which is not determined by physical age. How does an identity
become stale? How does an identity stay alive? How can we talk about learning
capability, not just in terms of stages of development, which are important, but also in
terms of engagement with social learning systems? Again, the dimensions provide a
framework for asking questions about learning capability. How can an identity keep
stretching itself across fractal levels, or dislocate itself across boundaries? How does
one embrace boundaries as a developmental process? How does a trajectory become a
learning asset, or a liability? What are the demands and effects of generational
encounters in terms of opening identities to each other? How does one use discourses
of the self as a transformative tool? How to stir the sleeping knowledges silenced by
prevalent discourses? What are the implications of power for the learning of an identity?
If power corrupts, does it corrupt learning—the learning of those who yield it as well as
Research agenda v1.1
14
the learning of those who are subjected to it? On the other hand, isn’t learning a way to
gain power? What power does it take to produce an experience of agency?
These questions about learning capabilities reveal how interlinked social learning
systems and identities are. They realize their learning capability in relation to one
another. This does not imply a deterministic relation. On the contrary, learning capability
supposes that the two are in tension rather than locked in. Yet, theorizing the learning
capability of one always has to refer to the learning capability of the other.
Functional elements of learning capability
When one is applying this perspective to the learning capability of a specific social entity
(a community, an organization, a country), it is necessary to consider some functional
elements of learning systems. A provisional list of these functional elements derived
from work with organizations in the private and public sectors includes:
• Performance imperatives. Learning does not happen in a vacuum, but in the context
of performance imperatives that give it direction. These expectations of performance
may come from the outside or be internally driven; they may be broadly shared or the
topic of much conflict. They may be instrumental to survival or to some other material
goal, but not exclusively. With the focus on identity, much of what a social learning
system is about is personal, interpersonal, and cultural. It is nevertheless essential to
give a central place to performance imperatives in the functional picture of a learning
system. What are the demands that social systems and their members have to
respond to? What are the processes by which these demands are expressed
(market mechanisms, cultural aspirations, mandates, personal quests, etc.)? Where
are the production systems that realize the performance imperatives of the learning
system? What are the activity systems, the division of labor, and the productive
practices that organize the performance of the system? How are the learning and the
performance systems coupled?
• Social fabric. The performance imperatives operate in a social system held together
by a set of relationships. Our ability to learn individually and collectively in response
to these imperatives depends on the quality of these relationships. What is the
overall quality of relationships across the learning system? How much of the network
is based on transactional relationships as opposed to enduring mutual commitment?
Are there strong notes of mutual commitment? How easy is it to cross boundaries?
What is the nature of citizenship within the system? What are mechanisms of
cooperation and competition? What are the norms of behavior? How productively
can the social fabric handle differences and conflicts? What factors can affect the
quality of the social fabric?
• Governance. Learning is not a neutral issue, but a political one highly prone to
controversy. Because learning entails “improvement,” what constitutes learning
depends on an interpretation of improvement: what some view as learning may be
regressing to others. This is true of both system-level and individual learning. How
does a system and its members come to interpret performance imperatives, translate
them into learning imperatives, and direct efforts and investments accordingly? How
does the system deal with disagreements? How does it orchestrate knowledgeproducing processes and evaluate learning? To what extent does learning itself
become part the system’s imperative? Who develops a view of the system’s learning
capability and cares for it? What forms of leadership are present or required?
Research agenda v1.1
15
•
•
Institutionalization/codification. To what extent does a learning system translate its
own learning into artifacts (tools, documents, procedures, etc.)? This includes
codification of knowledge that reifies the results of learning into artifacts. It also
includes the institutionalization of performance imperatives, standards, norms,
methods, policies, and roles, which reify processes and define the learning systems
structurally and functionally. What are the processes of codification and
institutionalization? Who does it? With what authority or consultation?
Education. How explicit is the process of enabling learning trajectories through a
system? All learning systems make some trajectories more likely than others, but not
all have specialized functions for this purpose. What kinds of facilities exist for
shaping trajectories? How does these facilities translate overall learning imperatives
into local participation imperatives (e.g., schooling requirements, curriculums, tests,
degrees)?
It is important not to confuse these functional elements of learning systems with the
institutions that are most visibly set up to address them. For instance, countries have
governments whose overt role it is to perform governance functions. But the range of
governance requirements and functions within the learning system is not necessarily
restricted to government officials. Actually, today, the proliferation of NGO’s and
foundations in many countries reflects governance functions at the learning level that
expand well beyond the confines of government institutions.
These functions vary along the dimensions listed earlier. For instance, a function at one
level of scale does not necessarily propagate to other levels. A policy within a company
is not necessarily that of its industry, nor is it necessarily something that groups inside
the company adopt, value, or adhere to uniformly. The same could be said of a
performance imperative translated into a strategy. Crossing structural and functional
dimensions will be central to the task of developing a framework for theorizing learning
capability in social systems.
To keep these levels in perspective, it is useful to organize the investigation of learning
capability around the boundary of a given institution. For instance, a school may have a
well-defined function within the learning system of society, but this says nothing about
the quality of its internal learning system. (Many schools do not do a very good job of
enabling learning trajectories for their teachers, for instance.) Similarly, a government
may take a strong hand in the political governance of the country and yet may be
completely disorganized with respect to the governance of its internal learning systems
or pay no attention to the country as a learning system. More generally, given a social
entity—be it a community, an organization, an association, a region, or a nation—the
theory’s interplay of social structures and identities yields a two-tiered framework for
exploring learning capability. The entity’s boundary needs to be considered at the
learning-system level:
•
How does the entity organize itself as a learning system?
Focusing on the internal structure, how to enable a projection of learning imperatives
into fractal community structures that can deliver the necessary capabilities.13
13
The first question has received the most attention in research literature and in practice under the learning
label (Argyris and Schon, 1978; Senge, 1994; Wenger, 1998; Garvin, 2000) and under the knowledge label
(Dorothy Leonard, 1995; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Davenport and Prusak, 1998; Wenger et al., 2002;
Saint-Onge and Wallace, 2003), though I believe we still are at the beginning of the learning curve, and we
need more examples.
Research agenda v1.1
16
External
learning
systems
Internal
learning
system
Learning
system
Identity
How is it integrated in
broader learning systems?
Structurally? Functionally?
How participation in the
system integrates with
a person’s broader identity?
Learning system boundary
Multimembership boundary
How is it organized as a
fractal learning system
internally?
What trajectories of identity
are made possible within
the system?
Figure 4. Internal and external learning systems for a given entity
•
How does the entity integrate in broader learning systems?
Focusing on the boundaries between learning systems, how to participate in broader
learning systems, and how to interact productively with other entities?14
Considering individual trajectories yields two further symmetrical questions focused on
identity:
•
How does a learning system enable or shape trajectories of identity?
What kinds of trajectories are possible through the system, inbound, peripheral,
outbound? How is multimembership made possible?
•
How does internal participation relate to broader trajectories of identity?
How does participation in a system play out in the broader identity that people build
in the rest of their life? Is it easy to reconcile? Are the two in conflict?
Figure 4 is an attempt to represent these relationships graphically. Note how learning
system and identity interact in multiple ways:
• internally: participating in the system
• at the boundary: living and bridging the boundary, bringing things in and out
• externally: being associated with an entity in the eyes of the world
Note also that the four questions in the figure repeat themselves at each level of scale.
So they are a way to explore learning capability recursively within learning systems.
14
This question is starting to attract the attention of researchers and practitioners: upstream learning
networks (Dyer and Noboeka, 2000), value webs (Allee, 2002), knowledge exchanges laterally and
downstream (von Hippel, 1988, 2002); and industrial clusters as “rails of practice” (Brown and Duguid,
2000). See also Gibbons et al. (1994) for an analysis of the emerging, distributed systems of knowledge
production, which involves new kinds of collaboration across sectors. Annalee Saxenian (1996) argues that
functioning as a regional learning system is a key to the success of Silicon Valley as a thriving and
innovative high-tech cluster.
Research agenda v1.1
17
A social theory of learning: identity and learning systems
In this section I have presented a broad outline of the theoretical framework as I see it
shaping up. There is still much work to be done to make it coherent, robust, and useful.
Are the dimensions, modes of belonging, and functional requirements outlined here the
right ones? Are they the minimum set? Are some missing? How do all these elements
interlock and how do they fare in the face of data? How useful are they in explaining
learning capability? These are the kinds of question that the theoretical part of the
project will work on.15
Still, this proposal should give the reader a reasonable sense of the general direction of
the theory. In summary, bringing learning and social theory together is useful to both
enterprises. Learning theory gains the ability to focus on the production of
meaningfulness, not just the mechanics of skill acquisition. It can do this by locating
learning within our engagement with social systems that provide tools and context for
negotiating meaning.
• On the one hand, learning is subsumed under identity, which becomes the crucible in
which our bodily, emotional, cognitive, and social existence produces an experience
of agency.
• On the other hand, learning is also a property of social systems at various levels of
scale, from our local communities to the entire world. These evolving systems
provide material for constructing identities, and at the same time derive their learning
capability from the identities they enable.
Learning theory can apply all the sophistication of social theory to theorize this interplay
between identity and learning systems along multiple dimensions, including scale,
space, time, culture, and power, and in the context of functional requirements such as
performance imperatives, social fabric, governance, codification, and education.
Social theory in turn gains an ability to frame the production and reproduction of social
structures in terms of learning in everyday life. Mid-level concepts such as communities
of practice make it possible to talk about the production of social practices within the
scope of engagement of people and to view social structures as fractals in which
learning processes structure the social world at multiple levels at once. Finally, this
approach focuses on the learning capability of social systems, which has not been
addressed systematically so far, but which I believe needs to become a major concern in
social theory today.
15
Expanding the scope in the directions described in this section will also entail the integration of elements
from a number of other theories.
•
Embeddedness of learning systems. On the one hand, it will be necessary to explore how learning
systems interact with broader structuring elements of social systems. Examples of issues and authors
include historical periods and institutional structures (Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, David Harvey),
social stratification (Pierre Bourdieu), complex social systems (Niklas Luhmann), network society
(Manuel Castells), historical activity systems (Yrjo Engestrom), institutional settings (Jean Lave),
organizational culture (Joanne Martin), etc.
•
Embodiment of identity. On the other hand it will be necessary to include the part that individual
experience plays in structuring identity. This will connect with other theories that deal with individual
physiology and psychology, for instance, theories of intelligence (Howard Gardner, David Perkins,
Daniel Goleman), personal development (Erik Erikson, Robert Kegan, Carol Gilligan), social identity
theory (Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman, Anselm Strauss, Penelope Eckert, Leigh Star, Ken Gergen,
Sherry Turkle), evolutionary psychology (Steven Pinker), personal experience (Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi), biology of cognition (Humberto Maturana and Francesco Varela, Fritjof Capra), etc.
Research agenda v1.1
18
2. Learning trends: an emerging portrait
The second component of the research agenda focuses on learning trends. The goal is
to perceive, articulate, interpret, and elucidate emerging trends with respect to learning
in the world today. The purpose of focusing on trends is threefold:
• Theory: to illustrate, test, and expand/refine the theory by using it to explore the state
of learning in the world today
• Social commentary: to produce a useful, cross-sectoral portrait of learning at the
beginning of the 21st century
• Context for action: to set a concrete context for the implications for action, design,
and institutions, which are the focus of the third component of the research project
As illustrations of the kind of trends I would like to explore I outline four candidate trends
that I have been observing and could serve as initial working hypotheses for the project.
The first two focus mostly on the system level:
• Horizontalization of learning: a shift in our a view of knowledge communication that
emphasizes less the vertical relationship between a producer and a recipient and more
horizontal interactions required for the negotiation of mutual relevance
• Partialization of learning imperatives: the complexity of knowledge domains creates
relationships of interdependence so that learning increasingly means being part of
broader systems and learning to participate productively rather than mastering
everything oneself
The next two focus mostly on the identity level:
• Personalization of value creation: the need for personal engagement in work as a
key to creativity and knowledge-related activities
• Individualization of trajectories of identity. Identity becomes an individual experience
when it involves complex multimembership. This individualization is reinforced by a
number of related trends.
There will no doubt be others, and these may turn out to be misconceived, but they will
give the reader a sense of what I hope to accomplish.
The “horizontalization” of learning
Learning is traditionally viewed as a vertical process that involves a producer giving
knowledge to a recipient. From this “vertical” perspective, theory is often considered a
superior mode of learning. Practice then is a derivative of theory, an application that
follows learning. But practice is making a comeback. Rather than a derivative of theory,
practice is beginning to be considered an equal partner. The focus on practice does not
mean that theory is dismissed or even devalued. It entails on the one hand that the
production of theory is understood as a particular practice (e.g., recent trends in the
sociology of science16), and on the other that reflective practice is understood as a
source of theorizing (e.g., distributed modes of knowledge production17; action-research
methodologies18).
16
See Latour and Woolgar (1979).
See Gibbons et al. (1994).
18
See Argyris et al. (1987).
17
Research agenda v1.1
19
This focus on practice affects how we understand learning. The vertical view seems to
be giving way to a more horizontal view, a process involving negotiation among learning
partners. At first I was struck that so many companies are interested in cultivating
communities of practice as a way to manage their knowledge. Communities of practice
are by definition structures that enable peer-to-peer learning among practitioners. They
are horizontal structures. And they place the responsibility for managing knowledge in
the hands of practitioners. This in itself is quite remarkable. In most interpretations of
taylorism, knowledge is the property of vertical management structures that extract it
from practice to manage it from above. By contrast, fostering communities of practice to
manage knowledge horizontally is turning taylorism on its head.
This emerging phenomenon of horizontalization seems to be quite widespread. One
effect of the internet is also to enable horizontal connections. People share files. They
engage in conversations across hierarchies. They build blogs as a way to publish their
ideas directly and establish knowledge-sharing (and indeed knowledge-producing)
networks. Some development specialists are starting to explore the use of communities
of practice as a way to “horizontalize” the exchange of knowledge along the north-south
axis, by bringing together local practitioners and research scientists. It is not so much a
matter of democratization for its own sake as it is a matter of effectiveness of knowledge
exchanges in practice.
This horizontalization trend does not suggest that issues of power disappear.
Communities involve experts and novices with different degrees of influence and
legitimacy. Blogs compete for popularity ratings. But even when a transaction involves
the meeting of an “expert” with a “client,” the relationship is starting to be understood as
a “horizontal” one. Progressive doctors are attempting to reconceptualize the medical
consultation, not as an expert providing a service to a recipient, but as the meeting of
two forms of knowledgeability that have to meet and negotiate how they inform each
other. Doctor are still doctors, but the process of making their expertise effective requires
this horizontal exchange.
In all these examples, the central theme is the negotiation of mutual relevance of
different forms of knowledgeability as key to the production and transfer of effective
knowledge. Peers negotiate with one another how their respective stories are relevant
sources of knowledge for each other’s situation. Doctors negotiate how their advice fits
in the perspectives of patients. Scientists negotiate how their discoveries can contribute
to the practices of local farmers. Horizontalization is the key to ensuring the
meaningfulness of the exchange.
The “partialization” of learning imperatives
The increasing complexity and diversity of domains of knowledge entails an increase in
interdependence among people and among groups of people. Even within a specialized
domain, there is too much to know, too much new knowledge being produced too fast for
any one participant to claim exclusive ownership or full mastery of the domain. Learning
is learning to take part in the broader ecology of a learning system. When the learning
imperatives operate at the level of learning systems, learning for participants involves an
experience of “partiality,” that is, of being only one part of a larger process.
For individuals, learning increasingly requires learning to participate in learning systems.
Knowing is being able to participate in these complex systems rather than owning the
Research agenda v1.1
20
entirety of the domain of knowledge under consideration. One’s own knowledge is
always partial, and appreciating this partiality is essential to being able to contribute.
“Engaged partiality” becomes the main challenge and the way knowing manifests. From
an identity standpoint, partiality is a different relation to a domain than simply knowing or
not knowing. You know your part, but because your partiality is engaged, in practice you
know more than you know.
Organization increasingly find themselves implicated in “value webs” in which learning
imperatives expand beyond their boundaries. Businesses need to learn from and with
their customers. They need to include their suppliers in their knowledge-sharing
networks. They engage in joint ventures with their competitors as a way to explore new
technologies. Increasingly, firms have to participate in broader learning systems—
industries, regions, alliances, consortia—with multiple players including their
competitors, as well as more traditional sources of knowledge such as universities and
research labs. Participation in these systems is essential for keeping abreast of fast
technological developments. If sustained success in a knowledge economy depends not
only on effective participation in economic markets, but also depends just as much (and
with many of the same players) on knowing how to participate in broader learning
systems—industries, disciplines, regions—then a central characteristic of the knowledge
economy is the blurring of competitive and collaborative relationships. Firms that
compete for market share combine expertise through alliances and joint ventures. They
compete to recruit and retain talent, yet the movement of people promotes the circulation
and development of new ideas. They sell competing products and services, yet they
belong to the same learning systems, where they develop crucial knowledge, find the
seed of new ideas, follow technological developments, and establish common
standards.
The rules of participation in learning systems are different than those of product markets,
because reciprocity is at the heart of how mutual learning functions. If you hoard your
knowledge, you quickly gain a reputation of taking more than you give, and you will
progressively be excluded from the most significant exchanges. This is true of
organizations and of individuals who may participate in a community of practice. A
paradox of the knowledge economy is that when it comes to learning, your most
threatening competitors are likely to be your best partners.
The “personalization” of value creation
Today’s economy places an increasing emphasis on knowledge and innovation as a
source of value creation. But creativity is a voluntary act of engagement with a problem,
which cannot be designed or prescribed in the way that a routine action can. In a
traditional industrial setting, the formal design of a production system is the primary
source of value creation. Think of an assembly line where value derives from the quality
of the design of the formal process—division of labor, coordination, efficiencies, just-intime inventories. Informal processes still exist, but they produce value to the extent that
they conform to and serve the formal design. In the knowledge economy, this
relationship is inverted. The primary source of value creation lies in informal processes—
conversations, brainstorming, meaning making, and pursuing ideas.
In an industrial setting, you may have been able—and even this is debatable—but you
may arguably have been able to ask people to leave their identity at the door: hang it on
the clothes rack, put the bolts on the wheels, and at five o’clock, put your identity back
Research agenda v1.1
21
on and go live your life. In a knowledge setting, the engagement of one’s identity and
sense of meaningfulness in a situation is what gives rise to creativity and knowledge
production. It is the person as a whole that matters. It is the aliveness of the engagement
of people’s identity with the task at hand, which cannot be fully formalized. Formal
organizational designs and processes still have a role to play, but they contribute to
value creation to the extent that they are in the service of informal processes. This gives
rise to a paradox of organizational design: the formalization of organizational systems is
successful to the extent that it enables informal systems. Dependence on knowledge
and creativity gives rise to a shift in the primary source of value creation—from formal
systems to personal engagement as the primary source of value creation.
Another consequence of the personalization of value creation is a shift in the ownership
of the means of production. This personalization reframes some fundamental principles
of labor theory. In a traditional economy, capital owned by organizations provides the
“means of production” (tools, plants, energy) and employees sell their labor as operators
of the production system. In a knowledge economy, the picture is much more complex
because knowledge capital cannot be fully owned by organizations. Talented
practitioners consider their expertise to be a personal characteristic tied to their sense of
meaning and identity, not merely as an organizational asset that is owned by their
employers. They take personal responsibility for developing this expertise as a way to
further their professional trajectory. Increasingly this trajectory is understood and shaped
in terms of personal identity and allegiance to their craft rather than allegiance to a firm.
In a knowledge economy, these professionals own a large portions of the “means of
production,” the ability to produce knowledge (expertise, intelligence, creativity). This
ability walks out the door every evening. It can go elsewhere if the demand for talent is
high enough or if it finds more interesting challenges and developmental opportunities.
In traditional labor theory, employers want as much labor as possible for as little wage as
possible. Employees want to give as little labor power as possible for as much wage as
possible. The ability to produce knowledge, unlike traditional labor power, does not wear
out with use. Instead, it increases with use. Employment relations are therefore
becoming a kind of temporary “knowledge partnership.”19 Organizations are successful
in talent markets to the extent that they offer better knowledge partnerships than
knowledge workers would find elsewhere or by striking out on their own. Competing in
talent markets by offering attractive developmental opportunities does create a vexing
paradox for employers.20 You attract people by offering to contribute to the development
of their professional trajectory, but in doing so you make them more desirable in talent
markets. In other words, you retain people to the extent that you enable them to leave.
That both employer and employee have a stake in putting knowledge to maximal use
does not mean that their interests are fully aligned. The developmental aspirations of the
knowledge worker may still be at odds with the needs of an organization. The projects
that sell may not be the ones that you want to work on. The idea you want to pursue may
not have enough short-term pay-off. Still, for professionals, this personalization of value
creation places an emphasis on personal development. Learning becomes a primary
objective that ensures one’s marketability. Meaningfulness of engagement is crucial for
19
See Malone and Laubacher (1998), and Reich (1998).
Organizations of all kinds participate in talent markets. Increasingly, they have to compete for employees
who can contribute their ability to produce knowledge. For many high-tech organizations, recruiting and
retaining talent is a more daunting challenge than competing in commercial markets.
20
Research agenda v1.1
22
unleashing the creative potential of the individual. Work and identity have to serve each
other in the context of a personal trajectory.
The “individualization” of trajectories of identity
I have argued under the theory section that in a complex society, the issue of identity
becomes more individual because each person becomes a unique intersection of forms
of participation. Because our set of multimembership is so unique, because the social
contexts in which we define our identities are so diverse, we do not have companions
who share our trajectory. So while the trend of partialization may suggest that
individuality dissipates, the theory predicts that, paradoxically, it is actually the opposite
that happens. I think that data will actually bear out this hypothesis, though the research
still has to be done. While the anachronistic “universal knower” à la Leonardo da Vinci is
replaced by teams and communities of “partial knowers,” we also see individual identity
becoming a “project” that occupies center stage in society.21
A number of simultaneous trends contribute to this process of individualization—though
it is not easy to determine which are causes and which are consequences. The
personalization of value creation is certainly one factor. Furthermore, traditional
institutions of identity—nations, work organizations, formal associations—are losing their
exclusive empire on the definition of identity. We are no longer primarily of a nationality,
devoted to a company, or member of a professional association. Our identities have
always been complex, but the empire of broad, overbearing institutions of identity has
masked this complexity to a large extent. Today, multiple connections openly struggle for
shaping our identity, in particular, shifting forms of engagement with groups defined at
multiple level of granularity (owners of a brand of cars, a support group meeting once a
week, a music group or a sport team fan club, an online discussion).
An individualized sense of trajectory becomes increasingly driven by a developmental
thrust: community participation is less determined by geographical collocation or
institutional affiliation than by our interest and potentially our learning needs. Technology
and globalization contribute to this trend. Our identities determine which communities we
belong to and are in turn defined by these forms of intentional, learning-driven
(multi)membership.
In addition, a number of related trends also contribute to placing identity at the center of
learning issues in the 21st century:
•
Information is becoming more accessible. Access to information, a central challenge
for earlier institutions of learning, is less and less a problem. If anything, there is an
overwhelming plethora of information. The more salient issue now is how to forge an
identity that can navigate productively a growing sea of information. Our identities
guide our choices of focus and our accountability to the knowledge of myriad of
communities we enter in contact with.
•
Peripherality is a generalized experience. We are able to witness more practices
without being a member of the community. We have countless service encounters, in
which we witness practices as customers of our lawyers, doctors, financial advisors,
21
Anthony Giddens (1991) claims that what he calls the “project of self-identity” has increasingly become a
topic of institutionalized reflexivity as evidenced by the proliferation of self-help literature. The post-modernist
notion of the “decentering” of the subject is therefore only a partial account of current trends, which must be
interpreted as a paradox combining increasing partiality and individuality.
Research agenda v1.1
23
hairdressers, specialized stores, etc. We watch films and television, which show us
everything from live open-heart surgery to comedies about emergency rooms, exotic
healing practices to police watch. We lurk on web-based conversations among
aficionados. This generalized peripherality affects the proportion of deep to
peripheral participation as constituents of our identities.
•
The half-life of knowledge is getting shorter. Human knowledge is evolving so fast,
and our own trajectories go through such transformations, that much of what we
learn will be relevant for only a limited time. As much as what we know, what matters
is how we know—knowing with an identity that is ready to unlearn and relearn
constantly in order to move on.
•
Canons are being destabilized. Even as globalization creates homogenizing trends, it
also brings into contact a great diversity of cultures. Even within cultures, new voices
are struggling to make themselves heard. What constitutes our common cultural
heritage is less and less obvious, but increasingly contestable and contested.
Holding such a diversified society together requires less a common heritage than a
willingness to engage and learn across boundaries. Again, this ability depends on
identities able to manage the insider/outsider tension of boundary experiences.
Learning in the 21st century will be mostly about identity. There is talk of an information
society, of a knowledge economy. I claim that the society we are moving toward would
better be called the “identity society,” because identity will be the main concern of its
citizens and by extension its institutions. I believe that the 21st century will be the century
of identity.
Trends and patterns: an emerging gestalt?
Trends in learning depend on a number of factors (economic, political, cultural,
technological), which from a different perspective may be considered trends in their own
right. The trends I have described here illustrate the level of generality at which I believe
the notion of a “learning trend” should be. Establishing a trend requires a detailed study
of how it manifests in different settings, sectors, regions, and cultures. It is also important
to pay attention to counter-trends, such as the rise of fundamentalism as a possible
reaction to horizontalization and individualization, or the global movements of capital as
a counter-trend to personalization. And it is important to recognize that many of these
trends are not experienced to the same extent, and with the same capability for action,
across the globe. It is one goal of the project to sort this out in order to paint a portrait of
learning in the world today.
Furthermore, placing a detailed study of trends and counter-trends in the context of an
evolving theory may show them to be part of an overall gestalt. For instance, the trends I
described all seem to point toward the importance of focusing on meaningfulness: the
mutual negotiation of relevance, the sense of participation in broader systems, the
investment of the self in work, the development of a personal trajectory. The hope is to
be able to make sense of broad shifts or social movements whose emergence is brought
to light by the theory.
The picture of learning painted by trends is crucial if one is interested in the implications
of the theory for action, design, and institutions, the topic of the next section. The
purpose of looking at trends and attempting to perceive broad, long-term patterns is not
to predict the future. It is to create a dynamic picture of learning in the world that can free
Research agenda v1.1
24
our vision from the tyranny of the present.22 Such a picture creates a broader context for
thinking creatively about increasing our learning capability. It provides an outpost from
which to take a fresh look at institutions and their role in society. Understanding trends is
thus a way to ensure that our conclusions about action, design, and institutions use the
theory in ways that are relevant to our times.
3. Learning implications: action, design, and institutions
In addition to revealing trends and making them interpretable, the theory should also
suggest implications for action. The third component of the research agenda is to
explore some of these implications, combining them with the trends to contextualize
them in a contemporary setting. This creates a future-oriented picture of learning that
can be used to frame a set of questions about the role and design of relevant
institutions.
In the dynamic and interdependent world in which we live, learning capability is
becoming as critical as knowledge. A main goal of institutional design then should be to
increase the learning capability of the system and its constituents. Yet, many of our
institutions are designed for knowing rather than learning. Business organizations are
designed to deploy knowledge for market success rather than to participate in learning
systems. Governments are designed to produce and enforce policy reflecting our best
knowledge rather than to orchestrate large-scale learning systems. Schools are
designed to teach what we know rather than to contribute to new learning capability in
students and in society. While deploying knowledge is important, it tends to depend on a
stable context. Developing learning capability is an additional design dimension, whose
importance is likely to increase. The orchestration of large-scale learning systems with
the goal of maximizing both the learning of the system and the developmental
opportunities of individuals is going to be one of the central societal issues of the 21st
century.
In this section, I will briefly look at four societal institutions: organizations, civil society,
governance, and education. These make sense as they correspond more or less to
functional elements of learning systems in general (listed toward the end of the theory
section). As such, what I say about them is relevant at multiple levels. For instance, what
I say about governance is relevant for the role of government from a learning-system
standpoint. But it would also be relevant to management in an organization in so far as
the role of management is to cultivate the organization’s learning system.
I will not attempt to be exhaustive or even-handed. As for the trends, and even more so,
the following examples are only given as illustrations of where I would like to see the
project going eventually. The research has not been conducted yet, and my speculations
about the theory’s implications are no better than anyone else’s. But with this caveat, my
experience is that seeing some examples of possible implications and questions derived
from the framework for actual institutions really helps. It makes the aspirations of the
project more concrete, even if the exploration is still mostly speculative at this point.
22
This is a characteristic that trends study shares with scenario planning (Schwartz, 1991), but trends are
less specific in terms of images of the future.
Research agenda v1.1
25
Organizations: institutionalizing performance imperatives
Historically, business organizations were the first to embrace the notion of communities
of practice as a useful perspective to focus organizational design on learning capability.
We have gained many insights from the experiences of these leading organizations and
of the four example areas I will cover in this section, this is the one where most progress
has been made. Now organizations in other sectors are catching up—government
agencies,23 hospitals, non-profits, foundations. But the dynamism and urgency of the
business world still makes it a leading player in exploring the institutional design of
learning systems. What does an organization look like if viewed as a learning system?
The theory’s dimensions and learning-capability questions combined with the trends
outlined so far provide the beginning of a framework to address this question.
One of the main purposes of organizations is to institutionalize a specific set of
performance imperatives. Business organizations respond to market demands.
Government agencies implement legislative mandates. Non-profit fulfill a charter. At the
same time, organizations have to make sure that they develop the capability to achieve
their performance expectations in a sustained fashion. Because the tasks and the
structures dictated by performance imperatives such as market demands or legislative
mandates are usually not fully aligned with developmental needs—of either individuals
or organizations—there is a need for structures focused on organizational capability and
professional development. Communities of practice have been found useful in this
regard because they engage the practitioners themselves in the process of stewarding
their learning. They increase the learning capability of the organization in a way that is
closely connected with performance because they involve the same people.
Interestingly, by emphasizing peer-to-peer learning among practitioners, communities of
practice reflect the trends described in the last section. Communities create horizontal
connections, which enable practitioners to learn from what to them often has very
immediate relevance: each other’s experience. This allows practitioners to rely on each
other to know all there is to know in complex domains (partialization). To do this,
communities depend on personal engagement. Teams do too, but in the service of
formal tasks defined by the institution. Communities of practice push the personalization
one step further: their coming together in the first place depends on identity, passion,
relationships, and a mutual commitment to a domain of knowledge. Finally, as platforms
for professional development, they serve the practitioners individual trajectories, beyond
the specific demands of a job. This last point becomes particularly important in
consideration of new relationships of employment in which moving along a
developmental trajectory is a primary aspect of the employment contract. How can
community structures become platforms for the development of professional identities
within and across organizations?
While the very characteristics described by these trends make communities of practice
ideal for stewarding knowledge, they also make them a challenge for traditional
hierarchical organizations. One of the key challenges for increasing learning capability is
how to combine hierarchy with a community structure capable of managing knowledge.
Formal systems, which tend to be vertically oriented, need to coexist and interact
productively with the learning system, where different kinds of relationships prevail. The
23
For a report on communities in the US Federal government, see Snyder and Wenger (2003) and for a
detailed case study at Health Canada, see Wenger (2003).
Research agenda v1.1
26
challenge then is to design the organizational structures and develop the management
practices that support and foster horizontal connections and personalized engagement.
Here are five bridging structures that have helped couple the production and the learning
systems in both private and public organizations:
• Strategic structure. Turning organizational strategy into learning imperatives that are
amenable to personal engagement by practitioners acting as communities.
• Sponsorship structure. The new roles that executives have to fulfill in linking
communities with the formal structure through two-way connections that honor the
integrity of each.
• Support structure. Logistical and educational support, leadership coaching, and
technological infrastructures that help communities of practice function in
organizational contexts.
• Knowledge-oriented accountability structure. Regimes of accountability that are
specifically oriented to knowledge and are distinct from traditional performance
accountability, for instance, the accountability that practitioners feel towards each
other to provide help and advice, or the responsibility that a community takes
towards warranting its knowledge output.
• Reputation structure. The formal and informal mechanisms by which knowledgeoriented contributions come to serve the trajectories of participants, including
recognition by peers, by the organization, and beyond.
Much is at stake in the productive interaction between the learning system and the
formal organization institutionalizing performance imperatives. Market success requires
depth of knowledge in strategic domains, but this investment in depth of knowledge can
often result in what Dorothy Leonard calls “core rigidities,” an investment in deep
capabilities that makes it difficult for the learning system to respond rapidly to changes in
performance imperatives.24 This investment is not merely a matter of resources and
habituation, but also an investment of identity, which needs a meaningful trajectories
onward. Conversely, market success brings along an investment in servicing the market
that can make it difficult for performance systems to respond rapidly to learning systems.
Clayton Christensen observes that market leaders very rarely remain leaders when a
disruptive technology shakes an industry. In what he calls the “innovator’s dilemma,” he
notes that even when the learning system of a successful company has kept up with the
new technology, the performance system is so invested in its market success that it is
almost impossible to incorporate the innovation within existing structures. He suggests
that the only way to enable the learning system is to create a separate performance
organization free from the constraints imposed by soon to be obsolete market success.25
While the first wave of interest in communities of practice was for the internal learning
systems of organizations, the learning imperatives of increasingly complex and dynamic
knowledge domains pushes organizations to consider more intensely how they can
participate in broader learning systems. How are they managing boundary processes in
the context of learning systems such as value webs, industrial clusters, and regional
networks? How can they combine competitive and collaborative relationships? What if
an industry as a whole becomes the primary learning system? What roles can horizontal
structures such as communities of practice play in providing inter-organizational learning
platforms?
24
25
See Leonard (1995).
See Christensen (1997)
Research agenda v1.1
27
Civil society: the social fabric of learning
The issue of learning capability in civil society is much less well-defined than in the case
of organizations with explicit performance imperatives. What there is to say is much
more speculative, not only because I have less personal experience but because the
topic is more complex to start with. Most of the talk about community building in civil
society concerns political activism rather than learning capability. Yet I believe that civil
learning capability is a topic that will need much attention in years to come and one to
which I hope the theory proposed here will contribute useful insights. How can we
consider civil society from a learning-systems perspective?
Social theorists have long been concerned about the social fabric in civil society as a
counterweight to the competitive and contractual relationships of the marketplace.26
Recent work by Robert Putnam documents trends toward a loss of “social capital” with
implications for indicators such as economic prosperity, health, and democracy.27 What
are the implications of this research for societal learning capability?
In the world today I see contrasts between approaches to civil society that place a large
emphasis on social consensus (as in many European countries) versus those that place
more emphasis on transactional relationships (as in the U.S.). My experience as a
European emigrant to the U.S. is that these two perspectives lead to a lack of mutual
intelligibility that blinds each side to the learning capability engendered by the other. One
could surmise that an extreme communitarian approach that takes social consensus to
be the only source of cohesion would inhibit learning capability by discouraging initiative
and entrepreneurship. Likewise a purely transactional approach, which assumes no
social consensus except for the legal commitments regulating transactions, would not be
conducive to dialogue and trust required for developing learning capabilities. Is it
possible to talk about the learning-capability implications of these approaches or of
different degrees of balance between the two?
How much can civil society learn from the experience of organizations?28 Would it be
possible to foster similar horizontal communities, both locally and globally, which would
provide enough meaningfulness to engage people and enable them to address issues of
importance to them? Would fractal community structures integrate regions into
globalizing systems without losing a sense of local uniqueness? Would they create
meaningful identities of citizenship at various levels of scale? Would they enable
boundary-crossing interactions to become a force for cohesion that avoid the two
extremes of consensus and transactional relationships?
These are good questions about the learning capability of civil society derived from the
theory’s community-structure perspective. But admittedly, the theory may be confronted
26
This goes all the way back to early distinctions by Ferdinand Tönnies (1887) between Gemeinschaft
(community) and Gesellschaft (society) and work by Emile Durkheim (1893) on “organic versus contractual
solidarity” and the status of the individual under increasing division of labor (Giddens, 1971).
27
See Putnam (2000). This view of social capital as a “common good” contrasts with Pierre Bourdieu’s view
of it as a source of distinction (1980). There are clear connections between social capital as defined by
Putnam and learning capability in organizations (see Cohen and Prusak, 2002), and a community of practice
is a social structure where learning and social capital depend on each other (Wenger at al., 2002); but these
links need to be explored further at various levels of scale.
28
For an initial discussion of community-based learning systems in the civic domain, see Snyder and
Wenger (in press). Conversely, the notion of citizenship in civil society can point the way to the relationship
between members and organizations in a knowledge economy (see Manville and Ober, 2003).
Research agenda v1.1
28
with a greater challenge. If trends like individualization and generalized peripherality
intensify, does there come a point where it no longer makes sense to approach civil
learning systems in terms of community structure? Does participation become so fluid
that communities do not have enough salience or sustainability in people’s lives to be
key elements of identification, as opposed to transactions and relationships? Should the
notion of a fluid networked identity then become the primary foundation for analysis?
Would this change the theory? Such questions are central to the nature of civil learning
systems, and to contemporary social theories of learning more generally. They will
certainly be central questions of the research project.
Governance: emergence and stewardship
The role of governance structures is typically approached from a political perspective in
social theory, that is, from the perspective of relations of power.29 A learning theory does
not replace this perspective (learning is itself political, I have argued), but adds the
dimension of learning capability as a central concern for governance structures. From
this perspective a key function of governance structures is to maximize the learning
capability of the social system.
For instance, assuming that along the time dimension, learning always involves a need
to deal with uncertainty, one could posit that a governance principle for social learning
systems would recommend some degree of distribution of risk as a way to encourage
experimentation. Then, from a learning-system standpoint, venture capitalism could be
conceptualized as a market-based process for making successes pay (in the form of
high return) for the failures necessary to the learning of system as a whole.30
Another key learning-based governance principle is what I call the “yoking of
independent learning experiments.” This principle would go something like this:
•
If a uniform policy imposes compliance on all the localities, the learning capacity of
the system is decreased because there is little experimentation (at least of a visible
and sharable kind).
•
Conversely, if everyone just does whatever they want, the learning capacity of the
system is not fully achieved because risk-taking and learning remain local.
•
If by contrast, a central governance entity makes sure that a network of independent
learning experiments are yoked together with appropriate support, communication
channels, and distribution of risk, then the learning capability of the whole system
and of the parts is increased. The yoking does not homogenize, but it does generate
some learning interdependence among the participants.
Examples of this principle are communities of practice convened by the US federal
government to connect cities across the country around issues such as gun violence or
children health.31 In a federal system, the political view of government is a division of turf
along the scale dimension between central and local governments. You have jurisdiction
29
Views of governance range from instrument of class domination to benevolent enforcement of the moral
consensus of a community.
30
There are of course other perspectives on venture capital investment, ranging from exploitation of labor to
shortsighted gambling, all of which suggest a cost to society. But when weighing the cost/benefit of a
function like this, it is important to consider its “learning” role.
31
See Snyder and Briggs (2003) for the detailed story. This paper also discusses a shift in perspective from
government as an institution to governance as a learning-systems property of civil society.
Research agenda v1.1
29
over this and we have jurisdiction over that. This makes sense politically. From a
learning-systems perspective, however, the yoking of learning experiments constitutes a
new role for a central government, which is neither policy nor laissez-faire. It is to bring
resources and connections that knit the learning systems across localities. This is
especially relevant today when most urgent problems do have this multi-scale nature
and typically cross levels of government: urban issues, education, health, terrorism.
Note that this role of maximizing the learning capability of a social system is relevant to
all governance structures at any level of scale, whether a nation, a company, a school, a
city, a foundation, the world, or a single community. Indeed, yoking independent learning
experiments is very much what a community of practice achieves when it connects
disparate practitioners with their own independent work into a learning system where
they learn from each other.
To make sense of the governance role of “keeper” of the learning system, it is useful to
distinguish between two forms of governance:32
• Emergent governance. Learning governance bubbles up from a distributed system of
interactions.
• Stewarding governance. Learning governance derives from a concerted effort to act
as the keeper of a process.
In the examples above, venture capitalists provide an emergent form of learning
governance when they distribute risk at a societal level.33 By contrast, the federal
government’s role in providing resources to convene a cross-city community is of
stewarding governance. Which form of governance or some hybrid is appropriate for
what issue or situation is a delicate design decision for learning systems—and so is what
kind of social structure is appropriate: government, NGO, philanthropy, community.
There is an array of governance-related questions. What are governance principles for
maximizing learning capability? How does a governance structure negotiate with the
system what learning means, what knowledge means, and what capability means? What
are the roles of elections and stock markets? Are the politics of learning fundamentally
different from the politics of knowing? From this light, how to reinterpret the role of
governance-oriented organizations such as government bureaucracies, legislatures,
courts, NGO’s, unions, foundations, etc.? How do these new roles complement or
conflict with more traditional governance roles, such as policy-making, oversight,
assessment, and adjudication? Do these new roles entail a horizontalization of decisionmaking processes? What are the effects of these new roles on the identities of the
governed? Do they change the meaning of citizenship? How does this kind of
governance invite new kinds of trajectories of participation?
32
This is parallel to the distinction by Jane Jacobs (1993) between two “modes of survival”: the commercial
mode and the guardian mode. She is interested in the moral foundations of these two modes, which she
argues are fundamentally different. One could also interpret them as learning functions. One uses the
distributed, emergent processes of the marketplace to make decisions, and the other uses the concerted
process of stewardship.
33
They may, however, take on stewardship governance with their “clients” or by organizing their own
community of practice as some Silicon Valley venture capitalists do (see Leonard and Swap, 2000).
Research agenda v1.1
30
Education: the management of trajectories of identity
If trends such as the ones of Section 2 are confirmed and the world they sketch out is
what students are to face, we will have to shift from an industrial model of education as
the mass production of skills toward a knowledge-era model of education as the
customized production of individualized learning trajectories. This is not a naïve call for
self-directed learning, for “free” schools, or for learning services selected in a self-service
mode. This shift requires an ongoing reflection on the nature of coherent learning
trajectories and on what it means to manage these trajectories intentionally. It also
involves a reflection on the role of educational institutions, not as self-contained places
of learning, but as integral parts of large-scale learning systems. I will now explore some
implications of this shift, again with the caveat that this is quite speculative at this point.
First, the common obsessive focus on curricular content and test scores regardless of
meaningfulness discourages many students from becoming personally engaged in
learning.34 This is often true whether or not they are successful in fulfilling the school’s
performance expectations. In many cases, the only way to succeed is to detach oneself
from any passionate engagement with the material because investment in any topic
becomes a time liability for covering the rest of the curriculum. This could be quite
harmful in light of the trend of personalization that emphasizes the importance of
meaningful engagement for productive participation in value creation.
Trends would suggest that finding a universal curriculum beyond a few basic skills of
literacy is going to become increasingly difficult and less and less useful. The main
reasons for this hypothesis have already been mentioned:
•
the destabilization of cultural canons, which make curricular decisions arbitrary and
indeed divisive
•
the increased access to information and peripherality, which allows students to find
sources of content other than educational institutions
•
the individualization of trajectories of identity, which focuses students on specific
goals
•
the receding of common ground as the main source of social cohesion in favor of
boundary crossing
•
the shorter half-life of knowledge, which makes it less likely that what a student
learns in school beyond the very early years of “basics” remains relevant later in life.
If curriculum coverage in terms of universal content is losing its validity as an educational
benchmark, how can we talk about the quality of education? What kinds of experience
are more likely to launch students on a sustained learning trajectory than the extent of
curricular content? Can the focus on identity transformation in social learning systems
help reframe the very notion of a curriculum? Developing a full framework to talk about
education in these terms is one of the goals of the project, which I believe has the
34
What meaningfulness means depends on a theory of the learning. A focus on identity places
meaningfulness in a broad context of participation in social systems. For instance, it would not be enough to
make learning math fun, to the extent that this assumes that learners are fun-seekers. We know that
adolescents pierce their tongue and their belly button. When something is meaningful and in the service of
their identity, they are ready to do things that are not fun at all. Similarly it would not be enough to make
math meaningful with manipulatives because this assumes that the scope of meaning-seeking is restricted
to the context of the lesson.
Research agenda v1.1
31
potential to transform how we conceive of educational design. Such an ambitious goal
will require much research before a robust framework is established. But the dimensions
of identity listed in the theory section already allow me to provide a sneak preview of
what an identity-oriented “curriculum of meaningfulness” might look like. Such a
curriculum would be framed in terms of a language about learning as identity
transformation, for instance:
•
Experience of localized depth. Going deep into some learning, into the practice of a
specific community and get a good sense of what full membership is. Experience
learning with others in the context of a community. Get far enough to experience
peer-to-peer learning with masters of the practice.
•
Experience of boundary crossing. Interaction across a boundary through
engagement in a shared task that forces cross-boundary negotiation.
•
Experience of time depth. Reach an experience of “flow” by being fully present and
creative in an activity.
•
Experience of time dislocation. Engage in a substantial contact with a different
generation as a vista onto history or onto the future.
•
Experience of cultural dislocation. Immersion in a different culture with a different
discourse of the self.
•
Experience of agency and power. Make a personal difference somewhere; not
necessarily a great success in abstract terms; have an effect on the world that is
experienced as personally significant.
•
Experience of scale. This may be the most difficult to imagine and to achieve in
practice. Hence its place last. Gain an appreciation of a full learning system in which
one is personally involved by traversing the fractal at multiple levels of scale. Learn
to find the community structure. Understand in as direct a way as possible how the
levels constitute each other and how the various functions are effective across these
levels (performance, governance, institutionalization, social fabric, personal
trajectories).
The hypothesis underlying this list is that it is more important to enable transformative
experiences of identity through full engagement with a few things that to cover extensive
content. As a result, it need not really matter what the domain is for any of these
experiences as long as it is meaningful to the student (and not harmful). But I would
suspect one needs at least one serious, transformative experience of each kind to be a
full participant in the 21st century.
Meaningfulness is really paramount here because of its potential for initiating a
sustained learning trajectory beyond the educational experience. Given the importance
of meaningfulness, it should be the criterion that determines when in the life of students
each of the experiences listed takes place and in what order. Because life is the best
source of context for an experience of meaningfulness, timing is critical. The foregoing
suggests that it makes less sense today to “frontload” education into the early years of
life. The time is long gone anyway when we could think of the first decades of life as
learning in preparation for the rest of life, which is mere “application.”
What is required is lifelong, but intermittent trajectory management. One could therefore
imagine a system where schooling is a lifelong, but intermittent experience. It is always
available as a place to take a breath, reflect, redirect one’s trajectory, gain some new
Research agenda v1.1
32
experience not available in the rest of one’s life. But it does not hold you beyond its
ability to provide you with a meaningful experience. It mixes students of all ages. Again
this is not a self-service offering of courses, of which the student is an occasional
customer. It is much deeper. It is really a place of trajectory management with a focus on
identity and meaningfulness and the resources to do this well at any age and with
longitudinal coherence. Education thus construed is not preparation for something else,
but a rhythm of moments of focus on identity renewal that are integral to a full life
trajectory.35
Far from arguing for the death of school, this perspective makes school a very special
place indeed.36 Its special role in life trajectories requires a distinct institution, free from
some of the pressures of society, yet it cannot fulfill its function if it remains sequestered
from the world. It needs to abandon the traditional view of educational institutions as the
place of learning in society and take society as the place of learning.
One reason curriculum has become so salient is that our schools act a bit like what
Erving Goffman calls “total institutions.” By this, he meant institutions that attempt to
become the entire life-world of their inhabitants through a kind of “civil death.” Of course,
he was studying much more drastic institutions, such as prisons and mental hospitals.
Most schools do not fit this category in the lives of students. But they do tend to act that
way with regard to learning. They fix the curriculum, control the learning process, and
test you on it in its terms. Forget your broader identity. It does entail a kind of “civil
death.”
The sequestration of educational institutions from the rest of society was once very
important to protect children from rapacious child labor, and remains so in a number of
countries. But it makes less sense in many societies today if we consider the price of the
separation: that education has to forego using participation in learning systems outside
as primary curricular material. Indeed, the focus on individual identity requires a parallel
expansion of the context beyond single institutions to the large-scale learning systems
that provide the learning material for a trajectory: identity stretches across the social
fractal.37 School becomes really special if it is thus integrated in the broader learning
systems.
•
For students, it means using the school as an anchor for constructing a coherent
trajectory in the world, i.e., learning to participate meaningfully in the world around
them as key to their ability to be lifelong learners.
•
For practicing practitioners, it means that their own learning systems are part of the
educational system. Their lives, their passions, their identities, their aspirations, their
knowledge are the curriculum. Perhaps practitioners eventually become the main
content resource. (And they are students too, anyway.)
•
For schools, it means mediating between learners and learning systems in the world
and acting as a source of coherence for real trajectories of participation.
35
Note that this would immediately solve the “school drop-out” problem by eliminating it altogether. School is
not something you can drop out of, but something you are in and out of constantly through your life. This is
not as tongue-in-cheek as it sounds. Maybe we have created the drop-out syndrome by artificially
frontloading schooling in life.
36
I say this because some people did interpret the early work on legitimate peripheral participation (Lave
and Wenger, 1991) as an argument against schooling.
37
This is why even today, the illusion that school is the enclosed source of learning is not sustainable.
Research agenda v1.1
33
•
For professional teachers, it means focusing primarily on trajectory management—
understanding student in terms of coherence of trajectory, being aware of available
resources, having good networks to connect students. A very important and difficult
job. Only secondarily are they delivery vehicles for specialized curricular material
when needed. And last but not least, they are adults in their own right with their own
lives, passions, and identities, which become resources they can invite students into.
And they are students themselves, as everyone, intermittently. All the teachers who
really had an effect on me were teachers who invited me into their own passion and
identity. Sometimes inside the classroom and sometimes outside, but always as
adults living in the world, not as roles in the institution. Personal passion for a
domain, curiously, is currently not a requirement for teaching.
Whatever their value as speculation, these images do bring to the fore important
questions about the place of schooling in a learning society. How can education be an
integral part of broader learning systems? If we accept that much time should be left
open for personally meaningful experiences, what is the strict minimum that all students
should cover initially, such as knowing how to read? How to make sure that this core
remains minimum while evolving to reflect the times? What becomes of the certification
role of schooling? What are the indicators that an experience is productively
transformative and that a school is really acting as the special place it is meant to be?
Theory in practice
These institutional musings may be completely misguided. The project may shoot them
down one by one on the basis of systematic research. But they do illustrate the kind of
long-term, theory-driven conclusions I would like to be able to reach. So I have not held
back even though I am reluctant to be specific too early.
No matter how it evolves, this learning-systems vision needs to become cross-sectoral.
The project will seek patterns across institutions. What one can learn from the others?
What design principles cut across sectors? How does a principle such as the yoking of
learning or the distribution of risks, if relevant, apply in business, in education, or in civil
society? What does the choice between emergence and stewardship look like in these
different contexts? And how do these institutions play complementary roles in the overall
learning system? How does the opening of the school affect civil society? How do the
designs for business organizations interact with the designs for school? What does this
say about the role of government in the process?
Again, it is worth repeating that the purpose of the project is to open up possibilities,
reveal patterns, and feed the imagination; not propose specific designs. This is because
in the realm of social theory, the role of theory can only be to propose conceptual
perspectives that train the eye to see. Theory is not to be implemented; only adopted as
a tool. Final say has to be left to practitioners in the field who can see the terrain. May
theory gives them good eyes to see; and may their seeing eyes rescue them from
theory.
4. Learning stories: a corpus of cases
Last but not least, this enterprise needs an empirical basis. This empirical part of the
project consists in looking for early examples of situations that can be usefully seen
through the lenses provided by the combination of theory, trends, and implications—a
community of practice, a company, a change in attitude, a development project, a
Research agenda v1.1
34
product, a policy, a regional agency, a fad, an experimental school. In short, where can
we find early cases that, as a straight story or under reinterpretation, give life to the
framework?
• Theory: How do the dimensions and distinctions of the theory illuminate a situation?
• Trends: Where do we see early indicators of a trend or counter-trend?
• Implications: What projects or designs embody, even in incipient ways, principles
that reflect the framework?
Most stories are likely to involve a combination of the above. Some stories may also
provide counter-examples that challenge or put into question one or more of these
elements.
Purpose of the corpus
Through a systematic collection of stories—so-called “systematic anecdotal evidence”—
the ambition is to combine the situated richness of narrative with the ability to perceive
broad patterns. A systematic collection of stories and cases interpreted from the
perspective of the theory should make it possible to see patterns and extract principles
in ways that traditional quantitative studies could not and in ways that would not be
possible from the inside of any particular story.38 Concrete stories illustrate elements of
the framework and contribute to its development.
• Theory: They make the theory concrete, test its usefulness, probe its limits, and
suggest refinements.
• Trends: They provide evidence for (or against) the trends, show the complex and
various ways they manifest and perhaps reveal deeper patterns.
• Implications: They provide concrete examples of what is possible in practice,
inspiring others to try their own version and warning them of potential pitfalls; they
also test the theory in practice through an evaluation of its implications for action.
Theory is the backbone of this process because it provides the discourse to interpret a
variety of situations in comparable ways and extract principles applicable beyond the
situations under study. The goal is to build a broad picture one story at a time, a bit like
an expressionist painting, but with an anchor in theory as well as hypothesized trends
and implications.
Elements of the corpus
The exact composition of the corpus is likely to evolve. It will eventually be possible to
include some quantitative data in the corpus, but the initial thrust is toward qualitative
research to explore the key categories and concepts that define the topic. Here are
some elements I am considering:
• Database of existing resources. There is already quite a bit of material that could be
catalogued in one bibliographic database, including newspaper stories and
magazine articles, academic papers, multimedia documents, community reports, etc.
Some of these may need reinterpretation to fit in the framework.
• Open registry. I have had a dream for a while of establishing a registry that will
enable anyone anywhere to register their community of practice, learning system, or
38
I am hoping to benefit from the experience of other projects that have attempted to build databases of
stories, such as the work of David Snowden (2003) at IBM and of Bronwyn Stuckey (2004) at Wollongong
University.
Research agenda v1.1
35
•
personal learning story via a web-based form that would act as a guided narrative.
This would allow a great many people to participate in the research by contributing
their story.
Detailed case studies. Build a series of in-depth case studies, using ethnographic
methods, such as direct participant/observation and interviews. Examples of topics
may include actual communities of practice and community-based initiatives in
different sectors (we can still use good examples of these), applications of a
communities-of-practice approach to unexpected problems, innovative projects,
analyses of boundary processes and large-scale learning systems. I would also like
to include individual learning biographies highlighting key events that shaped a
learning trajectory.
The inclusion of detailed ethnographic studies is an essential element of this project.
One of the dangers in hypothesizing trends, patterns or design principles is to let them
take on explanatory power. For instance, one could fall in the trap of assuming that the
horizontalization trend is making people act in a certain way. An ethnographic study
accounts for the details of agency in context—from the situated perspective of
participants—without assuming that any trend, pattern, or principle under study is
causally effective in the situation (except to the extent that these are actually known to
social actors and used in the negotiation of what they do).39 In other words, the situated
discipline of ethnographic studies helps ensure that patterns in the conceptual
framework do not become self-confirming.
A nexus of research projects
This is not a project for one person. This research agenda is meant to spawn a
multiplicity of research projects that contribute various facets to the overall picture. It will
take a diversity of perspectives, across disciplines within the academic world, and
among reflective practitioners, who can contribute their own stories and insights as well
as benefit from the conceptual tools the project intends to produce.40
In a university context, this research agenda offers many opportunities for students to
become involved:
•
Collect, reinterpret, categorize, and analyze resources and stories.
•
Look for patterns in the resource database and the story registry.
•
Produce ethnographic case studies or biographies.
•
Study a trend or an implication.
The overall research agenda will create a framework for dissertations in fields including
the social sciences, education, business, and government studies. Student participation
can take place at various level of involvement. Undergraduates and masters students
may focus on one illustrative case. Doctoral students may hypothesize a trend or a
major implication and collect evidence to support or dismiss their hypothesis.
39
This is an important criticism leveled at some structuralist and functionalist theories (Willis, 1977; Giddens,
1984).
40
Foundations for such a cross-sectoral, cross-disciplinary community already exist. The members of
CPsquare, a community of practice on communities of practice I co-founded, constitute an initial kernel that
is already engaged in cross-sectoral explorations and hungry for research projects (see www.cpsquare.org).
Research agenda v1.1
36
I also expect to partner with foundations and organizations interested in specific aspects
or application areas of the proposed work. Again this would provide opportunities for
students to become involved in projects. Examples of good candidates would be
corporations or associations working on their internal and external learning systems, or
foundations interested in the future of education, the formation of leaders for the
knowledge economy, practice-oriented reforms of continuing education in the health
sector, new approaches to development projects as learning partnerships, communitybased convening of government-sponsored large-scale learning systems on topics such
as bioterrorism, regional development, or disaster preparedness, etc.
As a way to get started, I imagine setting up a course that covers the main elements of
the evolving framework of theory, trends, and implications. As a course project, students
are asked to explore a case they could contribute to the corpus. Some of these students
become so involved that they pursue their investigation (with the same case or another)
in the context of their own course of study—a senior project, a master’s thesis, or a PhD
dissertation. A number of them get interested enough to join the core project team,
helping to manage the development of the corpus. Over time, the team serves as the
coordinating kernel of a broader community of partners, which involves researchers,
practitioners, and foundations doing related work in business, education, government,
and other relevant fields. Focused workshops, conferences, as well as applied projects
bring students and partners together. And year after year, the course reflects the work of
this entire community, with direct participation of some members as guest contributors.
5. Learning in the future: reflection on methodology
Underlying this agenda is a research methodology that is itself in need of articulation and
refinement. It is therefore useful to make such methodological reflection an explicit part
of the project. In summary, the methodology works at three levels:
•
At the conceptual level (theory) it attempts to find the timeless
•
At the pattern level (trends and implications), it attempts to understand and enable
the future
•
At the observable level (stories and case studies), it attempts to look for evidence in
the present (and possibly in the past)
The methodology has roots in qualitative methods, in particular ethnographic
approaches, but it also has elements of action research41 in its focus on implications,
appreciative inquiry42 in its attempt to see the future in the present, and scenario
planning43 in its aspiration to provide a long-term context for thinking imaginatively about
possibilities.
•
Future-enabling. The research is explicitly geared to the future. It seeks to see early
indicators of possible futures by reinterpreting observable cases in terms of their
foreshadowing something that the theory makes visible in the present.
•
Action-enabling. One criterion for the validity of the research enterprise is that it be
useful to practitioners in reframing their situation and opening new possibilities for
action. But these studies do not necessarily entail direct intervention into the system
41
See Argyris et al. (1987)
See Cooperrider and Avital, eds. (2004)
43
See Schwartz (1991)
42
Research agenda v1.1
37
under study. The primary purpose is to provide an interpretation of the emergent that
can both reveal and enable change. In this sense, the enterprise is slightly different
from traditional action research. The approach does not preclude intervention, but its
principal aim is reinterpretation.
A number of questions call for ongoing methodological reflexivity:
•
How much historical, political, and socio-cultural context is going to be necessary to
analyze patterns and specific cases?
•
Does the ethnographic and narrative approach scale up and down enough in time
and space to be used to study both large-scale learning systems and individual
identities?
•
What constitutes the conceptual rigor of such a research enterprise? How to keep
the centrality of the conceptual framework from biasing or homogenizing the overall
enterprise? Are there systematic ways to select examples and counter-examples to
make the overall picture more reliable?
•
What constitutes the application rigor of such a research enterprise? How does the
overall system of conceptual framework, trends, and implications with a corpus of
case studies aggregate into a useful window on the future? How to make it all
relevant and usable by practitioners and theoreticians alike? How to expose it to
use?
•
How to “walk the talk” both in building the project and in putting its results to use?
The project is itself a learning journey that requires a community, and perhaps more
than one. What kind of network will it take to create the necessary learning system to
bring this project to fruition?
Through it all, it is necessary to combine theory and practice. It is essential to anchor
policy-making, business transformation, school reform, civic development, philanthropy
and other efforts in a theory of learning capability. But theory needs to stay close to
practice, as it is its best source of inspiration and of safeguard from ideological delusion.
A learning theory for a small planet
Whether we embrace or actively resist so-called globalization, whether we care to
understand large-scale systems or are satisfied to go about our daily lives—we do so in
a context of growing awareness of the rest of the world. It is in our face on the news, on
the goods we buy, on the www’s we type. This is not just for those on the wealthy side of
the digital divide. In some of the poorest villages on earth, one of the first things
inhabitants acquire when resources permit, before running water, is a television with a
satellite dish.
A useful learning theory today has to be a learning theory for a small planet. As the
planet shrinks, our identities inflate, not in the sense of becoming bigger, but in the
sense of finding material of participation and non-participation both locally and globally.
The theory must be able to conceptualize learning in such terms. This is a tall order, but
again the goal of the present project is to develop a discourse on learning, not to remake
the world. The task of actually increasing the learning capability of our societies is the
doing of a much broader social movement, which I believe is already at work. Given the
Research agenda v1.1
38
scope and subtlety of what needs to get done, producing a conceptual framework is an
urgent, even if minute contribution.
It is increasingly important to be able to think about the world as a fractal social learning
system, with nested levels of structure. Developing identities of citizenship at multiple
levels of community is becoming a learning imperative, because the learning capability
of all these levels eventually rest in our identities—these learned experiences of agency
that serve as the social garments of our beings. Identification is our prerogative; we
make ourselves as we invest it selectively in negotiating meaning. We can use it to open
and to close, to engage and to withdraw, to stretch and to rest. We can use it to
delineate ourselves and to invite each other. In our identities, we are free to be as small
and as big as we care to be, because living in our bodies, we exist in our identities; we
are in the last analysis, beings of meaning.
* * * * * * *
I am excited by the prospect of pushing this research agenda forward. I am personally
ready to roll; and I know there is a broad community of others who are ready to become
engaged in various ways. At this point, I am looking for an academic home for this
project. I am also seeking sources of funding from foundations and organizations
interested in becoming partners. Support is needed for student projects, the systematic
management of the corpus of cases and stories, workshops and conferences, and
writing for a variety of audiences. If you think your institution may be a good home for
such a project or if you are interested in a funding partnership, let us talk.
Research agenda v1.1
39
References
Alinsky, Saul (1946) Réveille for radicals. Vintage Books.
Allee, Verna (2002) The future of knowledge: increasing prosperity through value
networks. San Francisco: Butterworth-Heineman.
Argyris, Chris, and Schon, Donald (1978) Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action
Perspective. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Argyris, C., Putnam, R., & Smith, D. M. (1987) Action Science. San Francisco: JosseyBass.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1972/1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1979/1984) Distinction: a critique of the judgement of taste.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Brown, John Seeley and Duguid, Paul (2000) The Social Life of Information. Boston:
Harvard Business School Press.
Capra, Fritjof (1997) The Web of Life: A New Understanding of Living Systems. New
York: Doubleday.
Capra, Fritjof (2003) The hidden connections: integrating the biological, cognitive, and
social dimensions of life into the science of sustainability. New York: Doubleday.
Castells, Manuel (1997) The power of identity. London: Blackwell.
Christensen, Clayton (1997) The Innovator’s Dilemma. Boston: Harvard Business
School Press.
Cohen, Donald; and Prusak, Lawrence (2002) In good company: how social capital
makes organizations work. Cambridge MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Contu, Alessia and Willmott, Hugh (2003) Re-embedding situatedness: the importance
of power relations in learning theory. Organization Science, Volume 14,
Number 3.
Cooperider, David and Avital, Michel , Eds. (2004) Advances in appreciative inquiry:
constructive discourse and human organization. Amsterdam: Elsevier
Publishing.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1990) Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. New York:
Harper Perennial.
Davenport, Tom, and Prusak, Lawrence (1998) Working knowledge: how organizations
manage what they know. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
DeFillippi, R.J., and Arthur, M.B. “Paradox in Project-Based Enterprise: The Case of Film
Making.” California Management Review, 40, no. 2 (1998): 125-139.
Durkheim, Emile (1893/1984) The division of labor in society. New York: The Free Press.
Dyer, J.H. and Noboeka, K. (2000) Creating and managing a high-performance
knowledge-sharing network: the Toyota case. Strategic Management Journal,
Volume 21, Number 3, pp. 345-367.
Eckert, Penelope (1989) Jocks and burnouts: social identity in the American high school.
New York: Columbia Teacher’s College Press.
Research agenda v1.1
40
Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to
developmental research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit.
Erikson, Erik (1963) Identity and the life cycle. New York: International Universities
Press.
Foucault, Michel (1980) Power/Knowledge: selected interviews and writings. Edited by
Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon.
Gardner, Howard (1983) Frames of mind: theory of multiple intelligences. New York:
Basic Books.
Garvin, David (2000) Learning in action: a guide to putting the learning organization to
work. Harvard Business School Press, Boston.
Gergen, Kenneth (2000/1991) The saturated self: dilemmas of identity in contemporary
life. New York: Basic Books.
Gibbons, Michael; Limoges, Camilles; Nowotny, Helga; Schwartzman, Simon; Scott,
Peter; and Trow, Martin (1994) The new production of knowledge: the dynamics
of science and research in contemporary societies. London: Sage Publications.
Giddens, Anthony (1971) Capitalism and modern social theory: an analysis of the
writings of Marx, Durkheim, and Max Weber. Cambridge University Press.
Giddens, Anthony (1984) The constitution of society: outline of the theory of
structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Giddens, Anthony (1991) Modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern
age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Gilligan, Carol (1982) In a different voice: psychological theory and women’s
development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Goffman, Erving (1959) The presentation of self in everyday life. DoubleDay.
Goffman, Erving (1961) Asylums. Harmondswirth: Penguin.
Goleman, Daniel (1995) Emotional intelligence: why it matters more than IQ. New York:
Bantam Books.
Harvey, David (1989) The condition of postmodernity. London: Blackwell.
Henton, Douglas, Melville, John, and Walesh, Kimberly (1997) Grassroot leaders for a
new economy: how civic entrepreneurs are building prosperous communities.
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Jacobs, Jane (1993). Systems of survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of
Commerce and Politics. Knopf, New York.
Kegan, Robert (1982) The evolving self: problem and process in human development.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kegan, Robert (1994) In over our heads: the mental demands of modern life.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno and Woolgar, Steve (1979) Laboratory Life: the social construction of
scientific facts. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Lave, Jean (1988) Cognition in practice: mind, mathematics, and culture in everyday life.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Research agenda v1.1
41
Lave, Jean, and Wenger, Etienne (1991) Situated learning: legitimate, peripheral
participation. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Leonard, Dorothy (1995) Wellsprings of knowledge: building and sustaining the sources
of innovation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Leonard, Dorothy and Swap, Walter (2000) Gurus in the garage. Harvard Business
Review, November-December, pp. 71-9.
Luhmann, Niklas (1984/1995) Social systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Malone, Thomas, and Laubacher, Robert (1998) The dawn of the e-lance economy.
Harvard Business Review, Sept.-Oct., pp. 144-152.
Manville, Brook and Ober, Josiah (2003) A company of citizens: what the world’s first
democracy teaches leaders about creating great organizations. Boston: Harvard
Business School Press.
Martin, Joan (1992) Cultures in organizations. New York: Oxford University Press.
Maturana, Humberto, and Varela, Francesco (1980) Autopoiesis and cognition: the
realization of the living. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Maturana, Humberto, and Varela, Francesco (1987) The tree of knowledge: the
biological roots of human understanding. Boston: Shambhala.
Mead, George Herbert (1934) Mind, self, and society. University of Chicago Press.
Nonaka, Ikujiro, & Takeuchi, H. (1995) The knowledge-creating company: how Japanese
companies create the dynamics of innovation. Oxford University Press.
Orr, Julian (1996) Talking about machines: an ethnography of a modern job. Ithaca, NY:
IRL Press.
Perkins, David (1995) Outsmarting IQ: the emerging science of learnable intelligence.
New York: Free Press.
Pinker, Steven (1999) How the mind works. New York: Norton.
Putnam, Robert (2000) Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community.
New York: Simon & Schuster.
Reich, Robert (1998) The company of the future. Fast Company, Issue 19, November,
pp. 124-128.
Saint-Onge, Hubert, and Wallace, Debra (2003) Leveraging communities of practice for
strategic advantage. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Saxenian, Annalee (1996) Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon
Valley and Route 128. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schwartz, Peter (1991) The art of the long view. New York: DoubleDay Currency.
Senge, Peter (1994) The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning
Organization. New York: Currency/Doubleday.
Snowden, David (2003) Managing for serendipity. KM Magazine, Vol. 6, Issue 8.
Snyder, Williams (1996) Organization, learning, and performance: an exploration of the
linkages between organization learning, knowledge, and performance. Doctoral
dissertation. Los Angeles, University of Southern California.
Research agenda v1.1
42
Snyder, W.M. and Briggs, X. de S. (2003) Communities of Practice: A New Tool for
Managers. IBM Endowment for the Business of Government,
www.businessofgovernment.org/.
Snyder W. and Wenger, E (2003) Communities of practice in government: the case for
sponsorship. Report to the CIO Council of the US Federal Government.
Snyder, W. and Wenger, E. (in press) Our world as a learning system: a communities-ofpractice approach. In Clawson, J. and Conner, M. (eds.) Creating a Learning
Culture: Strategy, Practice, and Technology. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Star, Leigh and Griesemer, James (1989) Institutional ecology, translation, and
boundary objects. Social Studies of Science. Vol. 19, pp. 387-420.
Strauss, Anselm (1978) A social worlds perspective. Studies in Symbolic Interactions.
Vol. 1, pp. 119-28.
Strauss, Anselm (1959) Mirrors and masks: the search for identity. Glencoe, Illinois:
Free Press.
Stuckey, Bronwyn (in preparation) What are the conditions sufficient for development of
successful Internet-mediated communities of practice and what part do
community initiators play in developing those conditions? Ph.D. Dissertation,
University of Wollongong, Australia.
Tönnies, Ferdinand (1887/1957) Community and society (Gemeinschaft und
Gesellschaft). East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
Turkle, Sherry (1995) Life on the screen: identity in the age of the internet. New York:
Touchstone.
von Hippel, Eric (1988) Sources of Innovation. London: Oxford University Press.
von Hippel, Eric (2002) Customers as innovators: a new way to create value. Harvard
Business Review, April.
Wenger, Etienne (1998) Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity.
Cambridge University Press, New York
Wenger, Etienne (2000) Communities of practice and learning systems. Organization.
Volume 7, Number 2, pp. 225-246.
Wenger, Etienne, McDermott, Richard, and Snyder, Williams (2002) Cultivating
communities of practice: a guide to managing knowledge. Boston: Harvard
Business School Press.
Wenger, Etienne (2003) The Public involvement Community of Practice at Health
Canada: a case study. Ottawa: Health Canada, Corporate Consultation
Secretariat.
Wenger, Etienne (2004) Knowledge management is a doughnut: shaping your
knowledge strategy with communities of practice. Ivey Business Journal.
January-February.
Willis, Paul (1977) Learning to labour: how working class kids get working-class jobs.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Research agenda v1.1
43